![]() ![]() What I learned during the development of my new art exhibition is that fast fashion is an issue for women and an issue for feminists. And I tend to make artwork about females. The thing is, I’m not an expert on fast fashion. There is a plethora of information online, if you’re willing to swallow the red pill. I could go on, but you’d probably be better off watching the utterly fantastic documentary film “The True Cost” or reading the work of Lucy Siegle, or listening to this Ted Talk by Clara Vuletich. Fast fashion’s ecological disaster trail starts from the moment a cottonseed is planted in a Monsanto monopolized farm. As for the environmental impact, well it isn’t just landfill that’s the problem. Many of these women are forced to leave their homes (and their children) for months, sometimes years, to slog it out in conditions we, in the West, would find incomparable. They have very few rights abuse isn’t uncommon. Most garment workers are women, or sometimes girls - around 85%, who get paid on average $3 a day. The fast fashion industry is the second biggest polluter after oil. I had no idea about the astronomical disaster machine that is: fast fashion. I came to realise that my prior knowledge was embarrassingly naïve. But what I learned over the coming months made the sweatshop stories seem like a sneeze in a hurricane. I’d heard the stories you know the ones, about those horrible sweatshops. I started to research the fashion industry. I visited the gallery space, a once-was garment factory, and knew immediately what the exhibition would be about. This deserted T made me think, is this “girl power” - all this, ummm … clothing? I noticed one lonely T-shirt with “Girl Power” emblazoned on the front. Laser focussed ladies were penning through rails that looked like overfilled salad sandwiches. ![]() I was in a quagmire of textiles - and it was unending. ![]() Audacious red sale signs roared at me, flagrantly enticing me with their many per-cent-off iterations. Surrounding me was a swamp of women’s clothing. Inside however, I was cooled by the temperature perfect air-con. He was to show me a new space he had discovered, one that I would soon be exhibiting in. I had some time to kill before my meeting with an art gallery director. It was just after Christmas and I was wandering around the basement of a well-known Melbourne department store. ![]()
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