Threadbare

Clothes, Sex, and Trafficking

Anne Elizabeth Moore, The Ladydrawers

• Publisher: Microcosm Publishing
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781621063544
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Ever wondered who makes your clothes? Who sells them? How much they get paid? How the fashion and sex industries are intertwined?Threadbaredraws the connections between the international sex and garment trades and human trafficking in a beautifully illustrated comics series. Anne Elizabeth Moore, in reports illustrated by top-notch comics creators, pulls at the threads of gender, labor, and cultural production to paint a concerning picture of a human rights in a globalized world. Moore's reporting, illustrated by members of the Ladydrawers Comics Collective, takes the reader from the sweatshops of Cambodia to the traditional ateliers of Vienna, from the life of a globetrotting supermodel to the warehouses of large clothing retailers, from the secondhand clothing industry to the politics of the sex trade. With thoughtful illustrations of women's stories across the sex and garment supply chain, this book offers a practical guide to a growing problem few truly understand.Featuring the work of Leela Corman, Julia Gfrörer, Simon Häussle, Delia Jean, Ellen Lindner, and Melissa Mendes.

Chapter 1:

The United States

If the United States isn’t the birthplace of fast fashion, it is certainly its spiritual home and primary beneficiary. Named for and based on the concept of fast food (in which cheap and easy hot meals are always available to the consumer, with a limited array of modifications), fast fashion has sought to make stylish but affordable clothing available to the consumer, created in a set palette of styles, patterns, and designs. A major difference between fast food and fast fashion, however, is that when the former is consumed, it’s actually gone. Fast fashion would never have taken off if the clothing it produced could only be worn once; instead it was made “rare” (and nearly disposable). Designs and styles would be sold for only a limited time, and social pressure to stay on trend—plus quick construction and cheap materials—would do the rest, a solution that doubled as a revolutionary marketing strategy. This meant that the traditional four seasons of fashion quickly gave way to an ever-replenishing stock of affordable clothes. Inditex (Spanish owner of Zara stores and a few other outlets) paved the way for these industry-wide changes, although the Gap, Nike, Mango, Forever 21, H&M, and many others quickly followed suit, speeding up production lines, streamlining designs, and pushing new apparel items out the door in as few as six weeks.

That’s where Threadbare begins. An introductory strip with Julia Gfrörer explains how the changes fast fashion set in motion at every stage of the apparel industry—from display to warehousing, from retail to policy—turned an in-home pursuit into an unfathomably vast industry in just about a hundred years. In that time, the garment industry has become the entity that most deserves to be taken to task for the global gender wage gap, although the poverty it inflicts isn’t visible in the ads. Fashion advertising depicts women as carefree, thoughtless consumers. They may be independently wealthy; they may not be. They don’t even care! The image projected by the fashion industry is that economics simply do not matter, but any fashion model—overworked, underpaid, and often as malnourished as a garment factory employee—will tell you otherwise. I lucked out by getting to spend a little time with Sarah Meier, an eloquent former supermodel, whose thoughtful takes on race, gender, sexuality, and economics in the modeling world set the tone for Threadbare. This is the debut of “Model Employee,” drawn by Delia Jean, the first of the strips created exclusively for this book. (You’ll want to note, for later, how seamlessly Meier addresses similarities between modeling and sex trafficking, nearly as an aside.)

Of course, the billboards, tax...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Chapter One: The United States
• Endnotes
• Chapter Two: Austria
• Endnotes
• Chapter Three: Cambodia
• Endnotes
• Chapter Four: The World
• Endnotes
• About the Ladydrawers
• About the Contributors