明治法 2015 I

My love affair with blue jeans began when I got into a bath with my very first pair. In the days before pre-shrunk denim, this was what I thought you had to do with jeans labeled "shrink-to-fit".

There was about them a special aura. Hard to find in the shops, they could be repaired, embroidered*, "personalized". You could stitch things on to them or cut them off. You could make a statement without saying a word. They made you distinctive yet free from the fear of looking odd. In fact, in blue jeans you could be whatever you wanted: masculine, feminine, granny*, groupie*, peasant, potentate*. Whoever you were, you could be someone else.

The original associations came, of course, from America via the Wild West and the Hollywood dream factory ― youthful, individualistic, forward-looking. They were hard to resist if you were growing up as I was, in a war-weary Britain still gazing backwards into the imperial sunset.

Today you can find jeans down gold mines in South Africa, up mountains in the Peruvian Andes, from the forests of the Congo to the catwalks* of New York and Paris. Eventually, when the flamboyant young designer of Paris haute couture*, John Galliano, was asked on TV what he thought was the single most important garment of all time, you just knew he had to say "jeans".

I'm not sure when all this began to wear thin. Perhaps it was when sick "poverty chic" and "grunge*" hit the fashion catwalks in the 1990s, clad* in blue denim. Or maybe "youth" figured out that if you aspire to be someone else for too long you become nobody at all and end up in uniform. And then, since all jeans are basically the same, paying double for the new breed of "designer" labels is hardly so smart.

One day a young woman from Guatemala came to see me. She described to me her daily life in a maquila ― export factory ― stitching jackets for the American market. Driven on by shrieking supervisors, she said, she made so many jackets in a day, and for so little money, that I could scarcely believe her. She assured me this was better than having no job at all, but I was unable to imagine what could be worse. As she talked, so softly, she trembled almost imperceptibly. News had already reached home that she had been speaking out. There had been threats against her children. I must not print her name or take her photograph. All that remained with me were her words.

So I remembered what I should never have allowed myself to forget. The true nature of a thing is not to be found in its "image". It lies in the materials and the people who made it.

Jeans are made from cotton, and cotton has spread across five percent of the earth's cultivable surface, invading fertile land in hungry communities, sucking them dry with irrigation*. Cotton uses higher volumes of more toxic* pesticides* than any other crop. A quarter of the world's pesticides are sprayed on it, causing a million cases of human poisoning every year. To make the fabric, cotton is treated with another concoction* of chemicals. Most of the vast quantities of toxins released by the textiles industry into the air, soil and water derive from the dyeing process. Fragile parts of New Mexico have been destroyed by the extraction of pumice* for "stone washing" jeans.

Fabric is too floppy*, the human body too irregular and the stitching too intricate to allow for much automation beyond the sewing machine and the individual operator ― almost always a young woman ― making one garment at a time. This is very laborious*. So jeans are stitched together in hundreds upon thousands of "sweatshops*" that have sniffed out the lowest wages in the world in places like Guatemala, Bangladesh and the Philippines, or in the immigrant "rag trade" areas of Los Angeles, New York, Toronto, Sydney and London.

Jeans have fallen prey to the concentration of capital in the retail sector ― that is, to an ever-smaller number of ever-larger retail chains that sell most of the garments we wear. They dictate what gets made, and collect half the retail price of the garment for their pains. It is their business to promote the slightest modification in design as a significant shift in fashion ― and a good reason to buy yet another pair of jeans.

I had heard rumors that the original jeans were made from hemp*, a fiber more usually associated with rope and sacks. There is a band of devotees* who claim that hemp doesn't need pesticides and has a number of different uses. Then through Ethical Consumer magazine, I found the Hemp Union of Hull, and Dick Bye on the other end of the phone. Yes, he said, Hemp Union sold blue jeans at $100. In fact, he sent me a pair in "natural" color. They are lovely―softer and floppier than denim, like linen but tougher, warmer.

What about the claim that Hemp Union products were "manufactured without exploitation"? Well, he said, the jeans were made for a company in Denmark by a manufacturer in ― China. The PC* pair was, said Dick Bye, perfectly feasible, but would cost more than three times as much, "and we don't feel that the current market would stand this". I'm sure he was right.

I thought about this for a minute. If poison- and sweat-free jeans cost $300, who would pay for the $50 pair? Why, those young women in sweatshops, of course. Think about this a little more, and you realize that if producers were paid more, so that they themselves could afford to buy fairly traded products that in turn cost less, and you'd be arriving at the right destination ― and traveling in almost precisely the opposite direction to current orthodoxy.

As consumers we do have power. We should use it as constructively as we can, opting for the relatively good rather than the absolutely bad products. After all, no one ever changed anything of importance just by buying something else ― but we can make a difference by not buying and protesting.