When you think of "handmade fashion", what do you picture? A young designer hand-sewing a garment? Hand-assembling a piece of jewelry? Hand-crocheting a tote bag? Many things come to mind, but the vision of a garment worker sitting at a sewing machine in a crowded factory may not be one of them.
While handmade fashion is often celebrated by the slow fashion industry, it is very much a part of fast fashion as well. Thousands of pieces are handmade by garment workers each and every day, yet we call this "mass-production" (which suggest the opposite of handmade). While machines may be able to produce our clothing with zero human intervention in the future, we're not quite there yet. As the slow fashion movement celebrates handmade fashion, it is unintentionally suggesting that fast fashion isn't handmade, therefore diminishing the hands-on work of garment workers.
This distinction is what allows consumers to believe that no human hands were involved in the production of a fast fashion item that costs less than a gallon of milk. To acknowledge that fast fashion is handmade, is to highlight the painful truth of the industry: we've gotten comfortable assigning value to handmade products made by some and not by others.
While it's an upsetting realization, and something we at The Butterfly Club feel partially responsible for (ie. endlessly celebrating our brands for their handmade pieces), we also see an opportunity. Here lies a chance to demystify handmade fashion, and one of the many inherent tension points between slow and fast fashion.
To truly break down those barriers is a large challenge, one that requires scaling slow fashion sustainably beyond fast fashion's reach. But that starts with a mindset shift, acknowledging that all handmade items are worthy.
For more information on garment workers rights, please visit www.remake.world and the "Who Made My Clothes" initiative from Fashion Revolution.