Worn Quotes

“(Tory) Burch made her fortune peddling the costume of the Upper East Side to a nation of women in middle management. Massenet and Burch were the emblems of a neoliberal feminism determined to frame exploitation in terms of opportunity and advancing freedoms. Burch's taglines were #Embrace Ambition and "Feminism is about equality." This kind of "feminism" celebrates the upward mobility of a few women capitalists. It props up the narrative of steady progress for American women, and swallows minor inconveniences like the endemic and structural impoverishment of foreign and immigrant women laborers.
As the garment industry left the United States, it undid the work of industrial feminists like Clara Lemlich and Rose Schneiderman, who had the audacity to demand that intellectual satisfaction was the birthright of every sewing machine operator. This new brand of feminism didn't care to protect sewing work as good work; rather it scoured the earth to find the cheapest new sources of exploitable, female labor.”
― Sofi Thanhauser, Worn: A People's History of Clothing

“protection to settlers in the midst of the Civil War. In the summer of 1863, volunteers under Lieutenant Colonel Christopher “Kit” Carson, ordered to neutralize the perceived Navajo threat, began a brutal campaign. Carson forced the Navajo on an eighteen-day march across three hundred miles, a march on which at least two hundred people died of starvation and cold, and during which the Navajos’ herds of sheep were decimated. The Navajo were then held in captivity at Bosque Redondo, a 1,600-square-mile reservation adjacent to Fort Sumner, until 1868. At Bosque Redondo, Navajo weavers were first introduced to bright chemically dyed yarns.”
― Sofi Thanhauser, Worn: A People's History of Clothing

“Textile production is one of the most energy-intensive industries there is, responsible for one tenth of all global carbon emissions.”
― Sofi Thanhauser, Worn: A People's History of Clothing

“2013, polyester, nylon, acrylic, and other synthetic fibers made up 60 percent of all clothes worldwide.”
― Sofi Thanhauser, Worn: A People's History of Clothing

“In 2010, JCPenney joined the fast fashion model, partnering with Italian company Mango, which is capable of moving new styles from design studio to store in a month. According to JCPenney’s CEO, “If you only deliver four times a year, there’s only a reason to come to the store four times a year.” Zara, founded in 1975 and based in A Coruña, in the northwest corner of Spain, helped create this paradigm. Zara stocked new fashions in stores every two weeks. In 2014, the company invested in four warehouses close to the Madrid airport, from which they began to ship almost 500,000 garments every day, making deliveries to each of the company’s stores twice a week.”
― Sofi Thanhauser, Worn: A People's History of Clothing

“with Italian company Mango, which is capable of moving new styles from design studio to store in a month. According to JCPenney’s CEO, “If you only deliver four times a year, there’s only a reason to come to the”
― Sofi Thanhauser, Worn: A People's History of Clothing

“export processing zones”
― Sofi Thanhauser, Worn: A People's History of Clothing

“Compared to the first appearance of clothing made from animal skin, approximately 170,000 years ago, and linen cloth, 36,000 years ago, silk—which first appears in the archeological record between four and eight thousand years ago—is a relative newcomer. Silk cultivation emerged, and for a good deal of its history remained, exclusively in Asia.”
― Sofi Thanhauser, Worn: A People's History of Clothing

“Nationalist debates on economic policy pitted the commitments to heavy industrialization and self-sufficiency in capital goods touted by Nehru—another Indian independence activist and India’s first prime minister—against a Gandhian vision of rural employment and small production. The debate bore some likeness to that between Alexander Hamilton, who favored rapid industrialization for the newly independent United States, and Thomas Jefferson, who wanted to preserve a nation of small farmers. In India, as in the U.S., it was to be the Nehruvian, pro-industrial strategy that won out.”
― Sofi Thanhauser, Worn: A People's History of Clothing

“The vast majority of cotton, from its simultaneous emergence as a textile fiber in India and Peru around 3000 BC up until the nineteenth century, was raised in patches alongside vegetables and grains.”
― Sofi Thanhauser, Worn: A People's History of Clothing

“The demographics of cotton farms in Lubbock resemble those of the U.S. agriculture industry as a whole: the farm operators are older, white, and U.S.-born, while most hired farmworkers are younger, immigrant, and Latino. Estimates vary, but it is likely that 75 percent of the agricultural workforce is undocumented. Those charged with using Roundup on cotton are in an almost impossible position to seek legal redress when their work exposes them to known carcinogens.[*] The average life expectancy for Latino farmworkers in the United States is forty-nine, compared to seventy-three to seventy-nine for the rest of the population.”
― Sofi Thanhauser, Worn: A People's History of Clothing