Manchester clothing brand Lawsuit Apparel turned the low wages of overseas garment workers in a unique jumpsuit to protest the exploitative practices within the fast fashion industry.
In 2014, shoppers in South Wales reported seeing mysterious messages on labels sewn into the neckline of clothes they’d bought from fast fashion outlets. They featured statements such as, “Forced to Work Exhausting Hours” and “Degrading Sweatshop Conditions”, and appeared to be cries for help from the women in Bangladesh who’d made the garments. Investigations revealed that the labels were likely stitched onto the garments in Britain by protesters, but the exact source of the labels remained unknown.
Last year the labels resurfaced on social media, accompanied by claims they’d been sewn into clothes from online fast-fashion retailers. The news articles that followed the TikTok trending videos brought attention to this latest wave of SOS message. Fast-fashion companies were stung and debunked the new labels.
The appalling conditions of those who manufacture our clothing is not a hoax.
While the fashion industry turns over nearly $3tn a year, garment workers, 80 per cent of them women, are still working for poverty pay, earning as little as £68 a month. Long hours, forced overtime, unsafe working conditions, sexual, physical and verbal abuse and short term contracts are all reality in the factories making clothes sold in the UK, and a lack of supply chain transparency doesn’t help hold brands accountable.
Lawsuit have now created a bespoke piece of “workwear couture,” in the hope of helping and supporting female factory workers and drawing attention to sweatshop working conditions in Bangladesh and beyond. Made in Manchester, this one-off jumpsuit features 500 “worker SOS labels”, stitched into the front-mid panels and will be auctioned to raise money for organisations campaigning to improve the lives of overseas garment workers.
Lawsuit creative director, Keith Gray, commented: “The problem with the original protests was that nobody knew exactly who’d created these labels, that were intended to give a voice to women making clothes in appalling conditions. So instead of focussing on the real issue, the debate became focussed on who’d made the labels, instead of the issues they were drawing attention to.
“This time there can be no doubt who created these labels of protest, it was Lawsuit. The jumpsuit is intended as a piece of art, which aims to provoke questions about the treatment of workers in the fast fashion industry, rather than who made the labels.”