Globalization

In a certain sense, the Western economy has been global since the sixteenth century. After all, the African slave trade,
colonialism, and the intercontinental trade in sugar and coffee made capitalism possible. But since the early 1980s, transnational
corporations, cyber technology, and electronic mass media have spawned a web of tightly linked networks that cover the globe.
Taken together, these forces have profoundly restructured the world economy, global culture, and individual daily lives. Nowhere are
these changes more dramatic than in the ways dress and fashion are produced, marketed, sold, bought, worn, and thrown away.
For consumers in dominant Western countries, globalization means an abundance of fashions sold by giant retailers who can update
inventory, make transnational trade deals, and coordinate worldwide distribution of goods at the click of a computer. It means that
what people are consuming is less the clothing itself than the corporate brand or logo such as Nike, Victorias Secret, or
Abercrombie & Fitch. Consumers are purchasing the fantasy images of sexual power, athleticism, cool attitude, or carefree joy these
brands disseminate in lavish, ubiquitous, hyper-visible marketing on high-tech electronic media. But much less visible is the effect
of globalization on the production of fashion.
As fashion images in magazines, music videos, films, the Internet and television speed their way around the world, they create a
global style (Kaiser 1999) across borders and cultures. Blue jeans, T-shirts, athletic shoes and base ball caps adorn bodies
everywhere from Manhattan to villages in Africa. Asian, African and Western fashion systems borrow style and textile elements from
each other. Large shopping malls in wealthy countries house all these styles under one roof. Like high-tech global bazaars, they
cater to consumers of every age, gender, ethnicity, profession, and subculture.
According to Susan Kaiser, This tendency toward both increased variety within geographic locations and a homogenizing effect
across locations represents a global paradox (Kaiser1999, p. 110). On the one hand, shopping malls in every city have the same
stores, and sell the same fashion items. Yet if we take the example of jeans, we find a seemingly infinite and often baffling array of
cuts and fits: from stretched tight to billowing baggy, from at-the-waist to almost-below-the-hip; from bell-bottom to tapered at the
ankle; from long enough to wear with stiletto heels to cropped below the calf. While a somewhat baggy, relaxed cut can signify
dignified middle-aged femininity, a baggy cut taken to excess can signify hyper-masculine ghetto street smarts. Each variation
takes its turn as an ephemeral and arbitrary signifier of shifting identities based on age, gender, ethnicity, or subculture.
While marketing campaigns encourage us to associate fashion consumption with pleasure, power, personal creativity, and individual
fulfillment, business economists and corporate finance officers have a different view. Contrary to fashion magazines, business
organs like The Wall Street Journal anxiously watch over consumer behavior as minutely measured by the Consumer Confidence
Index managed at the University of Michigan (Weiss 2003). In this view, consumption is neither personal nor individual, but
necessary for upholding a vast, intricate global capitalist economy. Dependent on massive fashion consumption in the wealthier
countries, this economy depends equally on massive amounts of cheap labor in poorer countries.

The Global Assembly Line

No longer manufactured by the company whose label it bears, clothing from large retailers is manufactured through a network of
contractors and subcontractors. Pioneered by Nike, the largest retailer of athletic shoes and fashions, the outsourcing or
subcontracting system was quickly taken up by giant retail chains like Express and The Gap, and big-box stores such as Wal-Mart.
These companies do not manufacture their own goods, but rather source and marketing goods produced on contract in low-wage
environments. Because they make large profits, they can force manufacturers to contract with them at lower and lower prices. To
reduce their costs, manufacturers subcontract much of the sewing, and even the cutting, to sweatshops in countries such as
Mexico, China, Thailand, Romania, and Vietnam, where poverty is high and wages can be as low as 23 cents per hour.
Manufacturers can also subcontract to sweatshops in the vast underground economies of immigrant communities in cities like Los
Angeles, New York, or London. There is a huge contrast, but a tight relation, between production in sweatshops, where young
women workers are often subjected to physical and sexual abuse, and consumption in retail chains filled with glamorous images.
Jobs come without even the most basic worker safeguards and benefits.
Since retailers can lower their prices to consumers by lowering their labor costs, consumers have unwittingly participated in
intensifying a system of competition among manufacturers that drives wages and working conditions downward. According to the
World Bank, one of the most powerful institutions of globalization, the competitive intensity of the U.S. retailing industry has
increased significantly (Biggs et al., p. 1). As a consequence, it says, new emerging retail strategies include the drive to offer
more value-oriented, low-priced goods to their customers, utilizing a global sourcing network that increasingly favors low wage,
quota free countries, and the liberalization of labor regulations (Biggs, p. 2). This liberalization means relaxing worker
protections for health and safety, lowering and also enforcing less stringently the minimum wage, and prohibiting workers from
organizing for better wages and working conditions.