Social Textiles

Last week I attended the Social Fabric symposium at Iniva, on the last day of the exhibition.

It involved a lively debate around the centrality of textiles in world economics politics and society. The first key-note talk by Art Historian Professor Sarat Maharaj articulated this point well. He presented textiles as a metaphor for society politics in contemporary times. But following the threads through history, we see how textiles, at the foundation of industrialisation and world trade, have had the ability to weave together or tear apart. Society like fabric is fragile and impermanent.

For example, Maharaj compared last year’s riots in the UK to the ‘tearing of fabric.’ The social fabric was thrown into a state of mayhem. But, he argues, this destruction was key in re-building society – it acted as the ‘ferment that begins the process of fabrication of the future.’

A connection is evident between phenomenons such as the London riots and the division of the manufacturing economy and the knowledge or service economy. This division was strengthened with industrialisation that textiles were at the centre of. Industrialised, modern society has devalued hand-skills and vocational work, basing success on school grades and university graduation, marginalising those for whom university is too expensive or choose vocational education, apprenticeship or jobs involving working with their hands.

Society has associated factories and making – the use of hand and body, with ‘labour’, and university graduates, with use of the mind, having ‘creativity’. Maharaj refers to Marx who along with his criticisms of the British colonial destruction of local industries, argued that the true creator is the maker as he is the one who contributes to capital. Thus, in the production of a garment for example, the designer and retailer are just secondary contributors to capital, the labourer who makes the garment is therefore the true contributor.

Re-building of society, the social fabric, is done through re-building of capital, through creating more jobs. It was interesting then shortly after this symposium to watch  the less profound ‘Mary’s Bottom Line’, the TV show about Mary Portas’ efforts to bring textile manufacturing back to Britain, in helping create more jobs and re-build our economy. In the first episode of this very one-sided reality show, Portas looks nostalgically back to the times that mills in north west England were thriving. A lingerie company in downtrodden Middleton, Greater Manchester has recently had to make their workforce redundant after generations of production in the UK, and moved production to Asia where it is cheaper.

The fact Mary decides to start a UK business making ‘kinky knickers’, along with the reality element – involving everyday people, makes for very entertaining TV. What Mary doesn’t mention though is that the booming textiles industry in the UK in the late 19th and early 20th century did damage to local textile industries in the colonies, suppressing industrial development, and flooding local markets with British made imitations of indigenous fabrics.

Gradually manufacturing in Britain declined and direction in cloth supply reversed. Textile manufacturers in Asia now thrive off global markets in order to survive. But these clothes are getting cheaper, while the costs of materials and manufacturing are not. Thus manufacturers cut costs by reducing the pay to their workers. While most high street brands must adhere to ethical initiatives, we have no idea who makes our clothes, and under what conditions. There is increasing awareness and concern I think amongst the general public about where their clothes come from. Hopefully there can be a market for British-made garments (providing they of course are running ethically), but it will never fulfil the high demands of the fashion market today. Further, garment manufacturing employs thousands (not sure of the statistics, but a lot!) of people in Asian countries, who rely on this as a source of employment, but this should not mean terrible working conditions and low pay. A change of mind-set needs to happen amongst consumers, and industry and the fashion world needs to encourage that along with ensuring fair wages, good working conditions and sustainable livelihoods for producers.

How to meet the demands for the hand-made without compromising its values?

On the other side of the coin, I was surprised to discover that the distinctly Indian brand Fab India which provides garments and homeware incorporating diverse traditional Indian crafts to a high-end market, has been partially bought by non other than Louis Vuitton (read here), and so expanding its capital on to the global scale. Fab India pioneered fair trade and the celebration and revival of traditional textile skills and processes for an elite urban market during the 1970s in India. Their export customers included Habitat in the UK. The producers were allowed the chance to continue their creativity and hereditary skills without being exploited for the ever-growing urban high-end and tourist markets, and their designs were developed and adapted to suit contemporary tastes. But how is the focus on these slow, highly skilled techniques able to continue if producing on a mass, global scale?

I learned recently that some garments at Fab India promoted as being made with ‘hand block-printed’ fabrics, were actually screen printed imitations of a block print. This was in order to meet the high demand and production deadlines. Is the return to a global reach of Fab India part of a fleeting trend, another phase in the West’s fascination with the exoticism of India? Anyone who has read my older posts telling of my travels and work in India, will see that I have experienced a few like Fab India such as Anokhi and Bandhej who have a similar market to Fab India, and smaller organisations such as Kala Raksha and Khamir, all of which are supporting traditional artisan communities who have struggled in the past  century to sustain a livelihood for their craft – because of a diminishing market and the onslaught of mass-production – to create contemporary products that make the most of the artisans’ skills, creativity and cultural heritage. While global markets seeking the ‘exotic’, ‘ethnic’ and ‘authentic’ have been successful for many of these artisans and organisations, if these organisations’ market grows too large, then the true aspects of the craft products that drew the attention of these markets in the first place could be forgotten about, at the risk of production becoming a more mindless, robotic factory line – bringing us back to the reference of Marx in Capital. John Hutnyk, the Academic Director of the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, another speaker at Social Fabric who carried out in-depth study into Marx’s Capital discussed labour in the textile industry. As capital grew, and industry expanded, the collective voice of workers came together to stand not against the machines or the power but those that use the power against them.