sca(red)

I saw Warner’s costume warehouse for myself on a lot tour about a month ago. Somehow our guide neglected to touch on the labor practices that had created the decades-worth of clothing and shoes that my group was drooling over.
OMG, we were free to touch.
And I forgot, for a while, that the garments weren’t conjured from thin air. I merely fondled the fabrics, experiencing first hand the wide gap between style and labor issues.
Nielsen’s overview of costumers during the studio system is easy to take for granted when you read it. It simply lays out the facts about that era, and the long hours, the sexism, and the racism she describes are unsurprising in relation to the labor practices we know are still taking place today in the fashion industry. And yet -- out of sight, out of mind -- it’s so easy, reflexive even, to fold this knowledge up and put it away until it comes up again in the form of an academic article or news segment (or film, like Real Women Have Curves).
Perhaps (in addition to guilt and PR spin) we forget the individuals behind the costumes we love because, to paraphrase a theatrical lighting designer I once met: If you’re doing your job, they won’t notice you. If the fit or the beadwork is bad, you think about the people who constructed it -- just as when CGI is bad, you actually bother to acknowledge someone makes it. To that end, Nielsen’s closing statement really dug its heels in for me: “The choices of that key costumers exercise in selecting costumes affect the way in which audiences ‘read’ characters in films and the nit-picking attention of the set costumers helps to avoid breaks in continuity, thus aiding the all-important suspension of disbelief requisite to out enjoyment of entertainment.”
Like “Handmaidens of Glamour Culture” (and Hope in a Jar) the historical, non-theoretical nature of No Sweat makes it a useful and enlightening text of documentation of period practices, if not the richest read ever. I was essentially a zygote during the Kathie Lee Gifford scandal, so it was nice to become apprised of that. But more, I was fightened by the endless laws and codes and tariffs of myriad countries that the fashion industry bends and uses for evil, and the care with which groups like UNITE must work to improve conditions under and around these regulations without causing poor people to get fired. What a tricky web. What a scary reality.
I appreciated Ross’s nod at the fashion industry as “darling for preferred causes” like HIV and breast cancer (I want to vomit every time I see a Product Red shirt from the Gap.) (Wow, “the Gap” just got assigned an entirely different meaning. Just now.) I wish he could have taken it further.
Who wants sca(red) t-shirts for the holidays? At least one to wear until finals are over.