Stitched Up Quotes

“Society sharply and criminally limits human potential. There exists at present a gross underuse of talent. This probably means that the cure for cancer is trapped in a slum-dweller’s cortex somewhere in India.”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion

“This passivity mystifies clothes and lands us in a visual world that we did not make for ourselves.”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion

“What is needed are ways to fulfil our humanity that go beyond possession.79 This would end cultural appropriation as a means to fill up the monotonous nature of modern life with escapist fantasy.”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion

“What is needed are ways to fulfil our humanity that go beyond possession.”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion

“It is impossible to refuse to participate.”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion

“Designer labels are often made in Chinese factories in the same polluting conditions as cheaper products. To reiterate Dana Thomas: ‘Yes, luxury handbags are made in China.”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion

“If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you’ve come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.’50”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion

“It is out of this movement that the real gains for garment workers have been made. What this movement demonstrates is that the way we change the world is as people, as citizens, as workers. This is the power we have over governments and companies. They need us more than we need them.”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion

“It is not enough to give the poor medicine; we must ask why they do not have it in the first place.”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion

“Health care should not rely on the free market.”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion

“Corporate causumerism is a direct opponent of progressive social movements.”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion

“Causumerism shifts blame for the world’s ills from capitalism onto individuals. As discussed, products considered ‘ethical’ are often the most expensive on the market, so ethical consumption is unfortunately deeply class-based. It is wrong to blame those with the least individual power in society for the destruction of the planet or the existence of sweatshops.”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion

“Causumerism shifts blame for the world’s ills from capitalism onto individuals. As discussed, products considered ‘ethical’ are often the most expensive on the market, so ethical consumption is unfortunately deeply class-based.”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion

“Causumerism shifts blame for the world’s ills from capitalism onto individuals.”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion

“Five major brands in the United States are supplied by Classic Fashion – Hanes, Kohl’s, Macy’s, Target and Walmart.”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion

“To live means to buy, to buy means to have power, to have power means to have responsibility.”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion

“PR promotions obscure the reality of corporate practices.”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion

“There is no way out of sweatshop labour or environmental devastation via an individual route. You cannot shop workers in China to freedom. You cannot shop the Aral Sea back to life. The neoliberal mindset that permeates the fashion industry must be shaken off because it is dangerous nonsense. Rather, we must confront the issues in this book critically and with a collectivist anti-capitalist attitude.”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion

“If the purpose of reversal dress is to be radical, why sycophantically surrender to the dress code of men?41 Why does ‘gender-neutral’ clothing always look like men’s clothing when shirts, ties, smart shoes and suit jackets are hated work uniforms for many men and symbols of exclusion and oppression for most working-class men and women? Why does the ‘gender-neutral’ body have to resemble that of an emaciated young boy?”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion

“Zoot suit ‘girl gangs’, like the Slick Chicks and Black Widows, wore feminised versions of the zoot suit.12”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion

“The charge sheet against the fashion industry could read as follows: fashion reinforces racism, sexism, gender stereotypes, class and unequal power relations. Fashion seriously exploits its impoverished workers and its customers. It pushes the values of wealth and greed, and promotes body insecurity and dissatisfaction. Fashion is a monopolised industry with large corporations controlling both the luxury and the mass markets. Corporations control the factories and the shops, the fashion magazines and the cotton fields. Fashion’s endless quest for profit means scant regard is ever shown for people, animals or the environment. In an industry that sells itself as a promoter of individuality, the reality is one of conformity with billions of pieces of trend-based clothing churned out each year and sent to identikit stores from Birmingham to Bangkok, with magazines on different continents promoting the same styles.”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion

“The German designer Hugo Boss owned a small textile company in Metzingen, Germany. One of his early contracts was to manufacture brown shirts for the emerging Nazi Party. By 1938 the firm had become a key supplier of Nazi uniforms, including for the Army, Hitler Youth and the paramilitary SS. As the war progressed, Hugo Boss’s factories were staffed by forced labourers from France and Poland, most of whom were women.”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion

“Louis Vuitton is another fashion house that aligned itself closely with the Nazi occupiers in Paris. Under the stewardship of Gaston Vuitton, grandson of the founder Louis Vuitton, the company benefited from a close relationship with the occupying forces. The company went so far as to produce busts of the Vichy regime leader Philippe Pétain in their factory. Gaston’s son Henry Vuitton was commemorated for his services to Nazi Germany.”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion

“Chanel used laws banning Jewish people from owning businesses to try to rob her partners, the Wertheimers, of the perfume business they had co-founded. Chanel moved in the highest Nazi circles in Paris and even played a part in the failed ‘Operation Modelhut’ plot, which involved her being an intermediary to Winston Churchill.”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion

“While the fusing of cultures can, in part, be celebrated as exchange, for the most part it is the outcome of domination.”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion

“adult women tacitly told to strive for a pre-pubertal body is a goal that spawns a myriad of linked acts of slow violence: low self-esteem, anxiety, depression and for some, drug and alcohol abuse, self-harming and disordered eating behaviour.”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion

“Unreachable beauty is a reminder to make an effort. But if you see something and you can reach what you see, then you do not have to make an effort anymore.’58 Effort entails buying clothes, accessories, cosmetics and perfumes – preferably from Chanel. As part of the wider capitalist system, fashion fuels ‘consumer demand by creating a craving that can’t be satisfied’.59”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion

“The ultimate poverty or loss of being has been described as being left with nothing to work with except your body, like an animal. This was the original definition of the proletariat.44 It is the situation for the vast majority of women working as fashion models.”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion

“In the early twenty-first century, the fashion industry equates beauty with thinness and requires models to be thin. Catwalk models today are on average just 15 years old and 80 per cent of all the models at the 2007 London Fashion Week were foreign workers.16 Young, far from home and under extreme pressure, models face serious exploitation.”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion

“throw-away culture: ‘Being sold the idea that whatever we do is OK because we can just recycle products when we are done is actually quite dangerous.’80 Our ability to recycle some clothes should not become an excuse for inactivity or for corporations to keep producing at the same unsupportable rate.”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion