Modern fashion’s industrial production depended on colonial exploitation and slavery

Evidence

The production of textiles is intimately tied to histories of colonial exploitation and slavery. Cotton as a product represents the tangled history of forced labor and unequal trade, while silk represents a long history of Orientalist exploration and theft. Beyond the raw materials of fashion, the production of cloth itself has been a highly imperialized affair. All in all, the advent of the levels of production required to develop “fashion” was reached only through the stolen values of colonization. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2845

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Pairs directly with the trees-as-infrastructure piece’s account of textiles (bark cloth, mulberry silk) by extending it into the political economy of cloth as imperialized production and theft.
• SEED: A history-of-fashion angle: the material origins of ‘fashion’ as an industry built on stolen raw materials and forced labor, not just aesthetic chronology.