IN THE SPOTLIGHT — SPARK CHANGE

Fast Fashion Fingerprints

By Iman Nakhal

The professor strides into the lecture hall, drops her things onto the table, grasps the podium, and into the hushing chatter declares, “Every single person in this room is wearing something made by a child.”

The silence is deafening.

She’s probably right. She’s probably right and I’ve never looked at my wardrobe the same since. Awareness of the fashion industry’s complicity in crimes against humanity is something I could not be willfully ignorant about past that moment. 

She was, of course, talking about “fast fashion,” the concept coined by Zara in the 1990’s which entails taking a product from design to rack within fifteen days. Most of the discourse surrounding fast fashion has been regarding its detrimental effects on the environment and its continuous crush of the Global South’s workforce, which is all valid.

However, I would like to focus on one specific vein of fast fashion and its origins: cotton. China is the world’s leading producer of cotton, creating twenty percent of the entire world’s consumption. Eighty-four percent of that cotton is made in the Xinjiang region, which is home to most of China’s Uyghur Muslim population. This cotton is produced in factories that, from various investigative journalists and satellite imaging, are confirmed to be no less than concentration camps.

According to The Guardian, “up to 1.8m Uighur and other Turkic and Muslim people [are held] in prison camps, factories, farms and internment camps in Xinjiang’’ (Kelly). This makes it the largest mass incarceration of an ethnic-religious minority since the second world war. Let’s reiterate. It is the world’s largest incarceration since the Holocaust. The Chinese government insistently refers to these concentration camps as “re-educational centers” and then later, when questioned, denied their existence “even though the Chinese government’s own documents have referred to them as such” (Samuel). There is an electronic trail left behind detailing the camps and their purposes on government web pages and social-media posts. I’d like to take a moment to appreciate the audacity of so open a mass extermination. How easily they thought nobody would notice that they would post things online, like a twelve-year-old discovering Facebook in 2008 for the first time.

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