How to Dismantle a System: Take it Apart

Blue jeans are the most common clothing worn around the world today. Five billion pairs of jeans are produced each year globally. In the US alone, 450 million pairs of jeans are purchased annually. Anthropologists surmise that at any given moment half of the world’s population is wearing blue jeans. Jeans are powerful symbol in American culture. To many, blue jeans represent the working class, initially worn by farmers, miners and laborers. They are also associated with the idea of rugged individualism, cowboys and the western “frontier”. Originally, denim fabric was dyed with indigo grown and harvested by slaves on plantations in the South and until cotton overtook it, indigo was the South’s most lucrative crop. Today, people around the world suffer because of how jeans are made and consumed. So does our planet. The last thirty years have seen an unprecedented speed up of the clothes-making cycle. The consequences are unsafe working conditions, wages too low to cover basic needs, long hours, harassment and assault, child labor and little to no voice in working conditions – workers are often beaten or fired if they protest. The dying and distressing of jeans is a particularly harmful process. Workers are rarely provided with safety equipment like gloves or masks and discharge from factories is not often filtered or treated before it goes into local water systems. At a factory in Vietnam workers “distressed” or “sanded” six pairs of jeans a minute, 400 pairs of jeans a day, six days a week.