Category: Zara

#whomademyclothes? Fazlul Ashraf?

A week ago PhD student Thomas Dekeyser tweeted a photograph of a note found in someone’s Zara jeans. We circulated it at work, and loads of people discussed what language it might be written in and what it could say. We’d found a note on a CD player and found help to translate it before.

There’s a genre of shop-dropping in which factory workers leave notes for consumers in the things they make. Sometimes they’re genuine. Sometimes they’re hoaxes. Sometimes they’re part of activist campaigns. See our post The 13 best examples of shop-dropping … ever for more. 

This one was particularly relevant for the Fashion Revolution movement, whose core question is ‘Who made my clothes?’ This note could simply be a direct answer. According to Reddit. Or is there more to it?

Thanks to Thomas and to Brad Garrett for the tipoff.
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Animation & trade justice activism: Greenpeace’s ‘Detox Fashion’

‘If only they could see the truth.’ ‘We can help them.’

Yesterday, Greenpeace announced that:

After ten months of #PeoplePowered activities and behind-the-scenes haggling G-Star finally committed to eliminate all uses of hazardous chemicals from its supply chain and products by 2020.

G-Star joins corporations like Levi’s, Zara, Victoria’s Secret, H&M and Nike who have already agreed to do this.

The imagery conjured up in the Greenpeace campaign is vivid:

They say you can tell next season’s hottest trend by looking at the colour of the rivers in Mexico and China. That’s because global fashion brands like Calvin Klein, GAP and G-Star Raw are using hazardous chemicals and dyes to make our clothes. These chemicals poison our rivers, and traces of these hazardous chemicals also end up remaining in many of the garments people buy.

But it’s even more vivid if your campaign video is an animation. That’s where those words come from, and this is its ‘Detox Fashion’ video. Bubbles are popping. Worlds of production and consumption are coming into view.

At followthethings.com, we’re fascinated by the ways in which animation can be used in trade justice activism. Our favorite examples so far have been Emily James’ “The Luckiest Nut in the World” (our page with the film embedded is here), Melanie Jackson’s “A Global Positioning System” (watch this here, and read our page on it here), and ‘Make Fruit Fair: the Movie” (in a previous blog post here).

What is that animation can offer a campaign, that a film including ‘real people’ cannot? Check out our Nut and GPS pages above, and read this, for some answers…