– So I wake up one morning to a DM box full of lovely friends informing me that one of those mass-manufacture, cheap, fast fashion clothing sites has recently been advertising
my red 15th century reconstruction for sale using my image of me in the dress. You know, the dress that if you saw the two part making series of, you will know took over
250 hours to make by hand, and that was now being somehow sold for the pretty price of $40.98. AKA, not even half of what
I spent on the materials. But the subject of the
obviously lacking ethics in this endeavor shall be discussed anon. We hear about this all the time. Artists having their work knocked off without permission left and right and nobody really having any power over doing anything about it. Or at least if something is
done about getting the images, or if you're lucky, the
actual product removed, it's only a matter of time
before the next offender rears its ugly head, thus repeating the exhausting never ending cycle. So it is 6:30 in the morning and I am staring uncomprehendingly at the bright red two digit
number under the dress I had spent an entire month and a half painstakingly hand stitching.
But that was apparently what
the retailer was promising by posting my image of
said handmade dress. And my first thought was, well, my first thought was how at
least they had the courtesy to barely crop out my face,
courtesy or perhaps cowardice. Oddly enough, I wasn't angry at all. For you see, I smelt meat, and I did what any other
cunning online creator would do when presented with the possibility
of fresh, juicy content. I bought the dress. It says it's going to take
10 to 20 days to arrive, which means it's probably
coming from China.
So if indeed this is not a scam, I cannot wait to see
what sort of monstrosity deposits itself into my mail
room a fortnight from now. But of course, it was not that simple. It is day 20 and no sign of the parcel. I am beginning to think
this might have been a scam. One strongly worded letter
to the company later, which I am shocked
actually received a reply, informed me that there was
trouble with the manufacturing and that the product was
effectively on back order, which apparently nobody bothered to inform the buyers about, but ok. My favorite part about this correspondence was the offer to further
discount the price I'd paid. This offer was conditional
on my keeping the dress and not returning it, which
I found highly amusing because it is not my returning the product that they should be so afraid of, it is what I'm going to do to
them when I keep the product that they should be more concerned about.
So let's find out what happened when the dress finally did arrive. 49 days later, I think this is finally the package. So let us see what sort of monstrosity decides to emerge from this parcel. (upbeat music) Here she is. In all–this is definitely not cotton– in all of her polyester synthetic glory, here is what is supposed to be a 15th century gown.
Well, I have to give them one thing, one of the things I was
upset with myself about on the original dress was the fact that I neglected to put in a waist seam, when I think clearly now
the original portrait did have a waist seam. At least they've got a waist seam in this. We got to go close up on this, because you need to behold
the full glory here. This is literally like worse quality than like one of those Hallowe'en costumes you get in a Hallowe'en
store that you wear for like one night, and this
is supposed to be billed as like a real wearable dress. Hold on. I mean, first of all,
it's got like literal wood chip splinters
hooked into the fabric. So I don't know if you can see, I will try and get as close as I can. The quality of the material first of all is the biggest disappointment. So what you can see, I
don't know if you can see. I mean, is there a tag in
here that tells me what it is? But it's, ok, there is a tag.
Usually a brand that doesn't
have anything to hide will tell you exactly what
percentage of the material is comprised of what fiber content. This is not even telling you, it's not telling you what
percent of cotton this is, so it could be 0% cotton
and 100% polyester, and I can tell you, actually,
we can go and test this. [Distant Piggie Squeaks] Ok, so it did actually catch fire which suggests there is some
natural fiber material in here, and it does smell a
bit like burning paper, which again, does suggest that there is a bit of natural fiber
cotton material in here. They're not lying about the
cotton, however, as you can see, cotton when burnt will start
shredding off into ash. That's not happening here. In fact, the edge has just melted completely back into plastic, which means the majority of the fiber
content of this material is synthetic, plastic, basically.
Which is why these synthetics
are so uncomfortable to wear, because if you, I mean, just imagine wrapping
yourself in plastic wrap. That's not very comfortable, it doesn't breathe and it's very sweaty. So the poor quality of the material aside, we can just take a look at
the closer details of this. I mean, in terms of design, they've got this situation going on here which is this strip is
attached to one side, it's not attached to the other side. It's meant to, I think, mimic the smock that I was wearing underneath
the original dress, which is supposed to be a
separate garment, not this.
But the way that this
is crafted, it's just, I mean, it just doesn't sit right because this is not meant to be a thing. I mean, the trouble with
these mass manufacturers is that when they produce clothing, they're producing clothing
based off of an image, based off of, I mean, someone's
stolen Instagram picture. When designers, when artists, when seamstresses and tailors
and actual craftspeople design clothes, they're
designing with the human body in mind, not with a
pre-existing photograph in mind. So, the original garments
obviously are made for people and they're made to be worn
and are made to be flattering and they're made to potentially last, because they are well-crafted, and who wants to put
craftsmanship to waste? So as you can see this was
just not thought through logically, there's no logic
to having this thing here.
If we look closely at the construction, the construction, obviously,
it's very hastily done. I don't want to put blame
on the seamstresses for this because they are probably
underpaid and overworked and are working very quickly according to the demands
of the manufacturer, so here you've got things,
I mean, this is just out of the package, but
already, threads coming loose. You've got threads that
haven't been clipped properly, so you've got extra stray
threads hanging off of things. You've got things like this
neckline happening up here where, I mean, the
stitching is just uneven. It's just completely wonkily put on. This isn't even a properly finished edge, it's just overlocked and
slapped on to the bit of trim. Opening it up, we can
see that it is not lined, there's no structure to
this bodice whatsoever, which means it's not going
to be very flattering on the figure, because all you've got is this single layer of very loose, limp, stretch synthetic knit material between your undergarments and the world, which is generally not
the best way to craft a nice, beautiful shape on a human figure.
Once again, this is
obviously working off of a photograph of my dress, so there's, I mean, there's no shaping to the bodice. Obviously there's no attention
to examining a real dress, let alone a real dress from the period or doing the research
to study the patterns of dresses from the period. So they're not going to
even come close to something that I have done because
I actually took the time to do the research to figure
out what makes these dresses the shape that they are
and how they behave, and ultimately, what makes them look like a really beautiful medieval dress. Anyone can cut out a square
of like your airplane blanket and make a dress like this. Another thing I can point out
is the length of the stitches is something that you can be looking for if you're looking to
identify whether or not your garment is good quality. Looking at the length of your stitches can also be something very telling, because if your stitches
are like nine miles long, they're turning up the stitch length so that they can stitch quicker and get the garments
produced more quickly.
Whereas, I mean, if you look
at a lot of 19th century Victorian clothes, clothing
that is still surviving to us 150 years today. The stitch lengths are so tiny, they're often just one
millimeter in length, and that creates a really strong seam. The fabric, whatever it's attached to, is attached so finely
and so firmly to itself that it's not going to be unpicked and it's not going to come apart or tear as easily as if you unpick
one of these stitches or one of these stitches
snags on something, as it's more prone to do
because there's more length between each point in the hole then, I mean, the whole garment falls apart. Back out to looking at
the dress as a whole, I mean, just furthering the
point of lack of craftsmanship. There are just raw edges that
are blatantly just overlocked, where you would not
see this in a genuinely nicely crafted garment, because again, stitching can pull,
once one of these pulls then you just have a raw edge. I don't even know what this is. I have no words for what's going on here.
It makes no design sense because it wasn't thought
through logically, it was thought through based
off of copying a picture. And again, right here on
the front of the sleeve, you've got this horrible overlocking situation happening here,
with some just casual loose threads, because I mean, who wants to be neat, am I right? Cool, cool. So we've had a bit of a
close look at this flat, but I've got two dress forms
and I have the original dress, so let's throw these on some forms and see what the real
differences look like. So, here we are, ladies and gentlefolk. We've got a little bit of a sizing issue, which is no fault of either dress. This one obviously is supposed to be a retail standard size
small, which is not my size, and of course this dress was made for me. If you do not know me, hi, hello, I have a severe case of Scoliosis that has completely
misshapen my upper body, and so all of the dresses
that I make for myself that I finish no longer fit my dress form and no longer fit any sort
of standard size of human.
Obviously, that dress
is not going to be made to my weird measurement situation. And this dress is not going
to close as it should. But most immediately, of
course, what we notice is the obvious lack of attention to historical pattern
cutting, which of course is what makes this dress this dress, and this dress look like a costume. So as you can see, they've
just gone for the standard bodice, waist seam, skirt situation, whereas this dress, I based
this actually off of a pattern of some tunics that were uncovered from, I'm gonna try, I'm really
gonna try, Scandinavian people, Herjolfsnes, Greenland, and just based on the number and the shaping of those panels, draped this shape on my dress form.
So I did the draping
myself, this isn't obviously a word for word historical pattern, but it's based off of the
original shapes that would have potentially existed in
the medieval period. So as you can see, we've
got one seam coming here, we've got one seam coming here. There are basically like
11 panels in this dress. In this one, we've got front seam. We've got back is all one piece, so the bodice is only three pieces.
That's what gives this
such incredible shape. That's what gives the
whole medieval period that quintessential medieval form fitting, beautifully shaped…shape. So I probably already mentioned that this dress I bought for $49. This dress cost me about
$200 in materials alone. This is a wool blend. I needed 11 yards of it. So that's, even for a wool
blend which is cheaper than a plain wool, which I
could certainly not afford at about $20 a yard plus the yard of silk that was needed for the under sleeve here, it was not cheap, not even the materials could be purchased for $40 like this. And then of course, additionally, this dress took about 250
hours to hand construct. Obviously if you do it by machine, it will be cut down significantly, probably about 100 hours, maybe.
If you multiply that by a living wage, hold on, I'm gonna do some math. I'm going by a $15 minimum wage, and that's like absolute basic minimum. Just the labor alone times 100 hours, which would be a roughly
machine sewn dress, maybe, I don't do a whole
lot of machine sewing so I don't know, is $1500, plus the cost of materials. Ok, if you're going like super budget, if you're actually making
this out of cotton, maybe you could spend 150 on materials, that is $1,650.
Hello friends, this is why
I don't take commissions, because, yeah. So that's how much of
this dress hypothetically would have cost at an
absolute basic minimum wage. I don't even know how you get
the materials that cheaply. They are using
significantly less material. There's that, to be fair. This dress probably only used
about three yards of fabric. There's quite a lot
involved in this dress, there's absolutely no silk,
there's no lining on this dress, so the silk sleeve lining on this dress is not apparent on this dress, I get it, it's a cost saving thing. There are no under sleeves
on this dress either. The only additional material they use is the strip of white that's
supposed to mimic the shift, which I haven't even
priced the shift into this because that was not
constructed for this project.
And then of course there are the closures, there is the trim, which I didn't even factor into that cost, so. Basically, what I can tell
you is that making clothes is really expensive,
clothing is an investment. It is something that when it's well made, when it's made of decent,
good quality materials, and when it's made to last, will last you a significant portion of your lifetime, as it did all throughout history. So historically, I mean, I'm gonna go into a whole rant here. Historically, here's how fashion worked before fast fashion,
before we are literally destroying our environment
with the textile industry which is one of the most destructive industries
in the world right now. Basically, the whole
point of this experiment was to expose the reality
of how much garments cost, how much labor goes into things, how much the materials cost, and the quality that can come out of it versus the concessions that
are made in terms of ethics, in terms of labor, in terms
of quality of material, in terms of durability of material, to get something that is not flattering, will not last you, but is cheap.
It makes me really mad. So how did we even get here? How did we even get to the point of exploiting people and
literally dressing ourselves in plastic that shreds and
then ends up in landfills and then destroys the environment? Where did we go wrong? How did people clothing in
history before we ended up here? And how can we go back there, maybe? Clothing took time, there were, I mean, if we're going before machinery,
before sewing machines, it took time to make,
because you had to do it all by hand, it took, I mean, everything, everything took time to make.
From the weaving of the
material which was done by hand, that would have cost you a lot
of money, it was so valuable. In fact, so valuable that
even in high fashionable elite like court dress, beautiful silk brocades, there's like piecing everywhere
on the front of garments, just unashamed piecing because fabric, especially those expensive
silks, were hugely valuable and there was no point in wasting them because they were so expensive. So your fabric was expensive,
your labor was expensive because it took so long
to make this stuff. Obviously, I mean, the exploitation of garment workers is nothing new.
Garment workers throughout all of history have a unfortunate history of just never really making enough to live just because the amount
of time that it takes to produce a single garment
by hand is pretty daunting. So somewhere along the
lines, we just lost sight of the fact that clothing, craftsmanship, is supposed to be an investment. And I'm not saying, like, clothing should only be for the elite, because people wore clothes
all throughout history, all classes of people wore clothes.
I think we've just become so reliant on the fast paced change of fashion. There's so many different
styles of clothing that show up every year and
then go away the next year, like those mullet skirts of like 2012 that are now not seen anymore,
where did they all go? Are they all in landfills,
surely people are not cutting them up into other stuff, because who does that nowadays? It's just not part of our
daily routine anymore. But whereas if you go
back through history, you can pinpoint, this is 1880s, this is 1860s, this is 1750s, this is the 16th century. These time periods have
very specific silhouettes because fashion changed
at a more gradual rate because people were paying
more for their clothing. Clothing costs money. You weren't just going to buy something, wear it for two years,
and then throw it away, you're going to buy something, wear it until either it wore out and you cut it up into rags or something, or if you are fashionable, you cut it up and make it into the
fashionable silhouette.
Because the fashionable silhouette always sort of builds on what was before. So, big, large skirts are
in fashion this decade, and by the next decade people are starting to sweep them up and bustle them back. It's all the same sort of
starting point of dress, it's just you're doing different things with the same source
material, if that makes sense. Nowadays, we're just
like the mullet skirts are in one season, and
then the next season, maxi dresses are in
fashion the next season.
So it's like, how do
you turn a mullet skirt into a maxi dress, you kind of can't, you have to go to H&M
and buy new clothing. So much clothing is now out in the world and exists right now. So there's no shortage
of garments, obviously, you go to a charity shop,
but these charity shops don't necessarily keep
everything that they're donated. Sites like Poshmark and Depop and Facebook groups of trading clothing, there's so much clothing
out there, there's no reason why we should be producing
clothing at this rate. So, yeah, I kind of now feel like I have a responsibility now
that there are lots of people following me on the internet for the fact that I do stuff with clothing, to pass on this ability to
recognize craftsmanship, to pass on basic skills
for working with clothing, whether or not you actually want to start making your clothes
yourself, which is fantastic, absolutely do it.
Whether you want to alter
clothes that already exist to make them more your
style or more towards the present fashion, that's cool too, to be able to take things from
thrift stores and flip them. To be able to take a garment
that's falling apart, maybe take it apart,
take a pattern off of it and then make a new one, that's cool too, Or whether you're just
here to learn how to take care of your clothes, to mend things, to maintain them so that they last as long as they possibly can so that
you're not getting a hole in your shirt or something and thinking, "Well, it's ruined now, I can't wear it," and you throw it away. That's not productive. If you read any 19th
century sewing manual, they go on and on and on about
the importance of darning, the importance of mending,
and they sort of stress into the reader who's supposed
to be teaching people, because a lot of these are
teaching instructionals, how to recognize faint spots in fabric so that rule number one is to darn a patch before it turns into a hole.
If something turns into a hole, it's like, what are you doing, are you even paying attention to your clothing? We've completely lost that,
that ability to fix our clothes. Everyone should know how to sew. It's not a feminine thing, it's not a like delicate, floofy thing, it's a basic, practical, technical
skill to be able to mend and maintain the things that you wear. So that is my rant. That was the purpose of
this whole experiment, is to hopefully shed some light on what's going on in the garment industry. A question now arises
of what to do with this, and I'm actually, I'm not
sure, I haven't fully decided. It's not getting thrown away. I will have to find a way to figure out how to put it to some functional use.
Or I may just keep it on this dress form as a little shrine to the
poor, presumably underpaid, poorly treated person
who had to make this. It makes me sad. Ok, so here's the thing. I am not a bespoke dressmaker or tailor, fashion designer or
small business retailer. I am a historian doing one
off reconstruction projects for learning purposes, not actually selling the items in the stolen pictures. The things that I post
online are not products that you can go and buy from me, so having images of my
work taken and used, while morally a bit insulting, doesn't actually harm me as a business. In fact, arguably, it has benefited me.
But what if you do sell the
work that you post online and large scale mass manufacturers claiming to offer the exact same product at a fraction of the cost
actually does harm your business? Well, you could hypothetically
avoid this entirely by not posting pictures
of your work online, but in today's visual internet culture, this is understandably
severely not an option. People don't buy what they can't see, what they can't drool over,
and picture themselves having in their lives and making them into the pretty Instagram picture. Your Instagram feed, your Facebook page, your YouTube channel, whatever
the heck the TikTok is, the free content that
you create and produce becomes the most direct
way for you to reach and appeal to an audience
on a personable level, and eventually becomes the
most cost effective means of advertising to your highly
engaged potential customers.
Brief interlude on the workings
of online business aside, I am unqualified to be giving legal advice should you be one of
the hundreds of artists and designers targeted
by this single site alone who have also had work stolen and potential harm done to your business. I personally am not planning
to take legal action because it is extremely
time consuming and I, as the sole proprietor of my business, am probably better off directing my energy towards creating new things instead of chasing down corporations in a probably futile
and extremely expensive international legal battle. This is precisely what
gives these companies the power to continue
stealing people's work and perpetuating
unethical labor practices, to continue producing utterly useless pieces of actual garbage
that don't provide any actual value to anyone's life.
The independent but
highly skilled dressmaker working on her dining room table, cutting her prices in
an attempt to compete with mass manufacture, and
to thus not making her rent, is generally not going
to have the time or money to continually fight these battles. However, Angela Jarman of
Fancy Fairy Wings & Things is one of the rare
artists who actually does pursue legal action against
design infringement, and just recently one of her wing designs despite the fact that she
literally posts video tutorials teaching people how to make her wings without violating copyright. So she is currently taking
legal action against this, so I will put her Instagram
and Youtube channel down below if you wish to follow along with the process and outcome of that. But whereas artists and
designers themselves don't seem to have had
much success in the past in putting a stop to the
theft and mass distribution of their designs, there are people who can ultimately change the behaviors of fashion manufacturers, consumers. Mass manufacture only
functions to serve demand, and if the demand for
these products is there, that is if we continue to
pour money into this industry by purchasing these products,
they are not going to go away, and the problem is going to perpetuate.
But how are we supposed to know? How are we supposed to distinguish
which brands are genuine and are going to send you the high quality and preferably ethically made
item pictured on the website, and which brands have just
lifted the pretty pictures off of Instagram feeds only to send you a cheap knockoff that is
unflattering and not made to last? This involves doing a bit
of research, unfortunately. You could go a bit more
in depth by searching for product and site reviews
on YouTube, on blogs, and in the general Googlesphere. And one must be aware of which
reviews are affiliated with or sponsored by the brand in the question, and how that may or may
not affect the review.
More simply, you can start
by just having a look through the website itself. A brand that is proud of
its manufacturing process because it doesn't have anything to hide will usually make these points known about in the About or FAQ page. You can also use practical thinking. What scale is the brand operating at? Do you notice them
churning out new designs every week or month? Do they stock products indefinitely, or are things produced
in smaller quantities that eventually sell out completely? Large scale, big operation companies tend to be constantly
putting out huge quantities of new products and compensate on quality, labor ethics, and environmental impact in order to keep up with demand. Hence the term "fast fashion". Look at the prices and
do a quick bit of math. Cost of materials aside, how many times can you
fit what you believe to be a livable wage into that price, and do you think that
is enough hours needed to make a garment of
that sort of complexity? Do we really need to be buying affordable new dresses every month if it means that the unnamed, unknown person who made those dresses is
overworked and underpaid? Finally, we as consumers
can learn to recognize, appreciate, and demand craftsmanship.
This is admittedly something
that's going to take a little bit of training,
as this is not something we are told about and are
meant to be concerned with. But as we saw during the
examination of the dress earlier, there are certain things that
we can pay close attention to. The quality of the materials used, and look at the labels if you need to. What percentage of the fabrics used are comprised of synthetics? You can look closely at how
the garment is put together. What the stitching looks like,
whether or not it's lined, and how the pattern cutting flatters or doesn't flatter the human body. The subject of fast fashion, of craftsmanship in the fashion industry, and how we as consumers can curate a stylish wardrobe without
being so destructive or going completely bankrupt,
is an extensive topic that I shall certainly be
exploring further soon.
For now, I need to go and figure out something to do with this dress..