California Apparel News

Every pair of jeans has a story to tell. From how they were acquired—fresh on the shelves or vintage store?—to the adventures each owner has taken them on.

Rachel Louise Snyder is interested in the backstory, what happened to jeans before they found their happy owners.

In “Fugitive Denim: A Moving Story of People and Pants in the Borderless World of Global Trade,” Snyder shows the lives, from designer to Third World garment worker, behind the demographics-shattering fabric of denim.

Two and a half years in the making, “Fugitive Denim” is the first book by Snyder, a journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine and who spends much of her time living in Phnom Pehn,Cambodia.

The California Apparel News caught up with Snyder on the West Coast leg of her book tour, and talked about jeans, globalization, and the complex moral issues that come with foreign labor.

CAN: Why did you choose to focus on denim specifically?RLS: I chose jeans because everyone can identify with them. They’re socialistic clothing, if you will: They cross party, gender, economic, and cultural lines. And they’re cool.

CAN: Did the book—and the denim industry—turn out to be initially what you thought itwould be?RLS: In a lot of ways, no, not at all. First off, I knew nothing about fashion, so that was all new to me. And I also knew very little about global trade. I knew that globalization affected all of us, but I didn’t know in what ways. I was also relatively anti-corporate, and the corporations I spoke with, by and large, did seem like they were trying to implement fair conditions. So I had to rethink my initial political thoughts, and I was proven wrong time and again. And I think you know you’re doing a good job when you prove yourself wrong.

CAN: What are the main themes we take from your book?RLS: Globalization is so often talked about in these large, grandiose ways, and yet what I would call the most important issue in globalization is the individual human struggle that comes out of it. And sometimes that struggle results in a great big payoff, and sometimes it only leads to more struggle.

So I wanted to tell the story of globalization in these really intimate, detailed portraits of individual lives. And there’s a direct link between all of us and the things we touch in our daily lives.

CAN: To play devil’s advocate, should the American consumer really be concerned with how goods are made? Is it a moral issue?

RLS: Absolutely. In this country we’ve eradicated child labor for a very good reason: We felt it was morally abhorrent. And we eradicated sweatshops for the same reason, and that led to the union movement in the early 20th century. So we have as a society decided it’s wrong for us. And if it’s wrong for us, it certainly should be wrong for the things we purchase.

CAN: But at what point is it imposing Western values on other cultures? Obviously we think we know better than them, that they should not be employing children. But then there could be other issues that have to do with the way things are in cultures that aren’t as advanced as us—such as with women’s rights, for example. When is it imposing our values, and when is it helping them to have a better society?RLS: There are a lot of things you could point to where I think that debate would have merit, but when you’re talking about health, safety, and basic rights to education, I don’t think there’s anything particularly cultural about that. I live in a foreign culture, and we have those kinds of debates in much more in-depth ways than anybody in this country probably experiences. You’re talking about people who are working 16-hour days, not 10. Quality of life is not cultural.

CAN: At what point does it become the responsibility of an apparel company and the consumer, since foreign working conditions are presumably largely controlled by local subcontractors? Or are the U.S. companies in fact essentially forcing foreign workers to work those kinds of hours?RLS: I think it’s more complicated than that, because there’s another factor in there: local governments. First of all, most manufacturers that I talked to talked about being under pressure from the brands. You’re not going to find a brand that goes in and says, “I insist that you work 80 hours per week.” But you are going to find a brand that says, “I insist that you have these 50,000 pairs of jeans made by the end of the month.”

So there’s that kind of pressure, and there’s also laws that are not enforced by local governments. And corporate brands do have some pull in other cultures to be able to say, “These are the conditions in which we want people to work, regardless of what the local government says.” So The Gap might say, “No more than 60 hours per week.”

CAN: What is the dark side of globalization? RLS: I think we already know: loss of jobs, terrible working conditions...

CAN: You mean loss of American jobs?RLS: Sure, although also just a general loss of jobs to technology. China loses about a million jobs per year to technology.

When you read the book, you see that I tried very hard not to come down on one side of the issue, because I was really trying to just portray what it meant in people’s lives. Globalization means a little bit of good, and a little bit of bad.

I feel like the debate on whether globalization is good or bad is somewhat beyond the point. It’s here. The point is to make it better.

CAN: And what is the bright side of it? RLS: In Cambodia, garment workers are the rising middle class, and that’s a good thing.

CAN: So the bright side is that developing nations get money pumped into their economies, which is better than no work.RLS: Well, possibly. Is making $30 a month better than having some autonomy? I don’t know. I think individuals would have different answers. But certainly the garment workers of Cambodia are leading better lives than they were 10 years ago.

CAN: How do you balance the desire to keep jobs in the United States with our obligation to help developing nations? Which is more progressive, giving work to a country like Bangladesh, or bragging that your jeans are made in America?RLS: I think different things are important to different people. For some people, made in the U.S. is very important. For someone like me, the condition in which jeans are made is much more important than the country in which they’re made. Some people care more about dyeing and environmental issues. So I wouldn’t call one approach more enlightened than the other.

Azerbaijan has a really interesting tension between the older generation that bemoans the loss of the Soviet Union and wants to go back to a time when they didn’t have to pay for their electricity and rent, and the younger generation that sees capitalism as a great opportunity. Also, Azerbaijan is trying so hard to enter the global economy but doesn’t necessarily understand the requirements.

CAN: What’s your take on China?RLS: I think what a lot of people don’t know is that as China gets more educated, it’s getting more difficult to fill low-way positions. The factories I visited in China all talked about how hard it is to get workers these days, and how they have to give so many more incentives. This is good for the workers, but there’s also a lot of protesting in China about working conditions, which we don’t really hear about so much. Labor is getting really expensive, about double what it is in Cambodia right now. So China isn’t going to be the cheapest place to manufacture forever.

CAN: How did the premium-jeans craze fit into your book?RLS: In many ways only peripherally. Would I spend $180 on jeans? I would if I knew they were made with organic cotton, good environmental control, and decent working conditions. But I think the more important question to ask, when people ask me where to shop, is whether or not we’re shopping in a way that is sustainable in the world. So if $180 jeans makes you buy fewer pairs, I think that’s a positive thing.

The average American woman owns eight pairs of jeans. That’s more than there are days in the week. It’s crazy to own that much.

CAN: But when you mention buying $180 jeans, you mention factors consumers may not care about. Organic cotton is one thing, but how the jeans were produced—designers and consumers would say the reason the jeans are $180 is for style and quality reasons. You’re paying for fashion, not a worker’s living wage.RLS: That’s probably true, but that doesn’t mean I agree with it. The demand for organic cotton grows by over 400 percent per year. The same way that we began to be concerned about how our food was produced, I think there’s a burgeoning movement with clothing as well.

CAN: Is organic cotton the answer? Or at least an answer? Is it better for the world?RLS: Sure, I think it’s better for the world. It’s not perfect: You need more land and more water, but do I think it’s better than a quarter of the world’s pesticides? Sure.

CAN: What do you make of this green trend? If good comes of it, then it’s certainly a good trend.RLS: I agree. If you want to be cynical and say it’s horrible that Wal-Mart is going green, okay, but that’s not me. I think Wal-Mart reaches a lot of people that the green movement wouldn’t otherwise reach, and if they do an imperfect job, at least they’re doing something.

Obviously I’m for environmental control. I think it’s difficult, however, to enforce things. I’ve heard of factories in developing countries that have all the environmental controls in place, and then once the monitors leave they turn them all off because it’s cheaper.

We’re in a desperate situation environmentally, so we need to do whatever we can.

CAN: What would you like the apparel industry to take from your book? What are the lessons they should learn, or the issues they should be informed about?RLS: That’s a good question, but my answer may be disappointingly simple. I would want them to extrapolate their own work in the global supply chain into those individual lives. I would want them to think there are 30 million more like the people in my book. To think of individual lives in the things they’re asking of factories, for example, which run all the way down this funnel to an individual life.

CAN: What do you make of this fabric, that has broken down the few remaining dress-code barriers and really become the fabric of our lives?RLS: Jeans are so adaptable, and people are so unbelievably passionate about them. There are people in the world who see jeans as poetry, and there aren’t many garments or fabrics that can be put in that category.