What Is the Right Price for Fashion?

Fabric, pattern-making, sampling, trims, sewing, handwork, packaging, duties, shipping: This is an incomplete list of what you’re paying for when you buy a new T-shirt. And that’s before a wholesale markup (i.e., the profit a brand makes on the item) or the additional retail markup if you’re buying it in a store.

Read that again, and the idea of a T-shirt being “worth” $5 might seem preposterous, if not criminal. How is it possible that all of those materials, logistics, and people amount to just dollars or cents? Many of those costs are fixed; the price of cotton isn’t negotiable, even at scale. The person who made the T-shirt, on the other hand, is a lot easier to exploit.

It would be reckless to claim that every low-priced good was made by an underpaid laborer, but it’s also just simple math. “It really blows my mind,” Ryan Roche said on a recent call. “I can crunch the numbers, and even with the cheapest fabrics, I don’t understand how it’s possible. Someone is sewing that T-shirt, and they’re being paid pennies.”

Maria Stanley, an independent, sustainably-minded designer based in Minneapolis, recalls her own experience working for a fast fashion label a decade ago in Los Angeles: “Retailers would tell us, ‘We want 1,000 of this item for $21 a piece,’ and the factory would quote us $40,” she says. “But eventually, they’d come down to $21. How do you get there? Who is losing out? The fabric is a steady cost, so it’s the workers [losing out].”

Read more on vogue.com

Article BY EMILY FARRA, 29/06/2020.

Photo: Gorunway.com