It’s the twelfth anniversary of the Rana Plaza collapse today, the deadliest garment-factory disaster in history. It was also the 114th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire a few weeks ago, on March 25.
I’ve read a couple essays recently, one specifically about the legacy of the Triangle Shirtwaist disaster (All Our Clothing Is Haunted) and one more about the fact that most industrial sewing still can’t be automated (All Clothing Is “Handmade,” Even When You Can’t See It).
They’re both worth a read and they both bring up a fact I don’t think many people realize: Robots aren’t making clothes; humans are. As Haley Houseman says in “All Clothing Is ‘Handmade,'”
No matter what you are wearing, it was made by a skilled team of workers. Somebody gently joined the toe seam of your socks on a machine where a human hand must stretch each individual knit loop in a row across a series of long teeth as fine as a comb. Every single seam of your shirt and pants was pushed through a sharp sewing machine needle by a person. Fabric was carefully laid out in broad stacked sheets, and then someone bravely cut individual sizes of a garment’s pattern pieces like slices of a layer cake. The zippers, buttons, and other crucial fastenings that keep your clothes on your body were attached—and only made possible—by the supple dexterity of fingers, even this late into the industrialization of clothing production. Every single label was carefully sewn in. Finished garments were ironed, folded, and packaged by someone flexing sore wrists at the end of a long week.
