Life and Death of Jeans

Maxine Bedat tracks the path of a pair of jeans from manufacture to market and uncovers the alarming human cost of the pursuit of mass-produced fashion, exposes the fractures in our global supply chains, an our relationships to each other, ourselves, and the planet.Fashion has never been bigger, cheaper and more dangerous for the planet.

Your favourite jeans brought from Amazon or Gap or Primark maybe the tag says “Made in Bangladesh” or Made in Sri Lanka”. But do you know where they really come from, how many thousands of miles they crossed, or the number of hands who picked, spun, wove, dyed, packaged, shipped and sold them to get to you?

The fashion industry is getting worse to disguise countless environmental and labour abuses. It empitomises the ravages inherent in the global economy, and all in the name of ensuring that we keep buying more while thinking less about its real cost.

Maxine Bedat, entrepreneur, researcher and advocate, follows the life of an American icon –  a pair of jeans to reveal what really happens to give us our clothes, We visit a Texas cotton farm, figuring out how to thrive without relying on fertilizers that poison the earth. Inside dyeing  and weaving factories in China, where chemicals that are banned in the West slosh on factory floors and drain into waterways used to irrigate local family farms.

Sewing floors in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are crammed with women working for illegally low wages to produce garments as efficiently as machines. Back in America, our jeans get stowed, picked and shipped out by Amazon warehouse workers pressed to be as quick as the robots prime to replace them.

Unraveled give us piercing insight, also highlight those jeans we had to have get sent to landfills or if they’ve been donated shipped back around the world to Africa, where they are sold for pennies in secondhand markets or buried and burned in mountains of garbage. This is not only the story of a pair of jeans but also the story of our global economy and our role in it.  Unraveled also challenges us to use our relationship with our jeans and all that we wear – to reclaim our central role as citizens to refashion a society in which all people can thrive and preserve the planet for generations to come.

Unraveled: The Life and Death of a Garment by Maxine Bedat, Portfolio £22.99/ $27.