To Die For: Is Fashion Wearing Out the World?

Sixty first-year fashion students at Northumbria University decided to have a go, spending a day in their own sewing room, set up as a simulated version of a typical production line producing T-shirts. From the outset it was deemed impossible for them to achieve the timings expected from garment workers, so our students were allowed 1 minute 55 seconds to sew each sideseam: in a standard factory for export they would be allowed just 48.5 seconds.

‘Fashions, after all12, are only induced epidemics,’

These incidents prompt the question, how did we get to this point, where fashion has more in common with a stampede at a football match than the delicate manners and attention to detail espoused by Coco Chanel?