The garment industry’s shape is constituted by histories of migration and racialization

Evidence

While fashion, on the one hand, takes place through systems of display and consumption which use, variously, techniques of ethnic exclusion and exotic hybridity, on the other, fashion is itself an industry with networks far beyond the moment of product display. This industry has had its own peculiar ethnic politics and, in the West, the shape of the rag trade has been deeply influenced, if not constituted, by particular histories of migration and racialization. The clothing industry, in its just mechanized form, requires limited capital and workspace. The skills of sewing and cutting are transportable, can be carried out alone, and meet a cross-cultural need. In Britain, famously, this laborintensive market has been filled by successive waves of immigrants, most notably, East European Jewry around the turn of the nineteenth century and beyond and South Asians and Cypriots in the post-1945 period. The poor working conditions of many in the clothing industry have been linked to a variety of racialized accounts, from the tenacious myth of the immigrant small business which exploits its own (womenfolk) in sweatshops to a more widespread exploitation of migrant businesses by multinationals who know how to use the iniquities of institutional racism as an aid to the production of profit. … The fashion industry relies on the hyperexploited labor of minority women and those at the higher end of the industry, the creative types, profess not to know about this at all (McRobbie, 1998:143). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2856

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Connects to the reader’s interest in infrastructure and labor — the garment industry as an unglamorous backstage system, parallel to how trees-as-infrastructure revealed an invisible supporting layer.
• XREF: Relates to the rag-trade sweatshop history and the myth of the self-exploiting immigrant business — echoes Jane Eyre and The Namesake depictions of immigrant labor and economic striving.