Who Built Fashion

Fashion is not just clothing. Clothing keeps you warm and protected. Fashion is what clothing means, and meaning is never neutral. Something, or someone, always decides it.

That’s the real subject of this essay. Not what’s in season. Who decided, and how much of that decision the rest of us have gone along with, usually without noticing.

What Fashion Actually Is
Clothing covers the body. A good coat is a good coat whether it was made last month or in 1985.

Fashion is the system built on top of it: the meaning, the timing, and the rules about what is right this year. It has an expiration date built in, because a changing “now” keeps people buying.

Style is what you do with both. It is personal, and it stays after fashion moves on.

People read your clothes before you say hello. Clothes also work on the person wearing them. In a well-known study, people wearing a white coat described as a doctor’s coat paid closer attention to their task than people told it was a painter’s coats. And most of us know the magic of an outfit that makes us stand a little taller.

Whoever decides what we wear has some say in how we move through a day. So it is worth knowing who has held that say, and at what cost.

Who Held the Gate
In every era, someone held the gate. The people changed. The questions did not: who benefited, and who paid.

Courts and Law
Fashion began as a way of showing power. In ancient Rome, the right to wear Tyrian purple was tied to rank, and the laws about it were strictly enforced. Senators and senior magistrates were entitled to a purple stripe on the toga and tunic.

Later the gate was written into law. In Elizabethan England, rules dictated which fabrics, garments, and accessories people of different rank could wear. Only the royal family could wear purple silk, gold cloth, and sable fur. Fashion wasn’t just aspirational. It was gated by law.

Historians describe the early fashion trades as a small traveling army of artisans and craftsmen employed to satisfy the ruling elite. They sewed what the law kept them from wearing. By the 1600s, with Louis XIV spending lavishly at court, Paris had become Europe’s fashion capital.

Couture and the Calendar
In the mid-1800s, the gate moved from the court to the couturier. Charles Frederick Worth, working in Paris, did something new. He presented his own designs to clients instead of waiting to be told what to make. He also proposed seasonal collections, which encouraged people to buy more often.

That is the moment fashion got a calendar, and the calendar got a profit motive. The name of the house began to matter. Credit and capital started flowing to the name on the label.

The Cotton Behind the Cloth
Industrial fashion needed cloth, and cloth needed cotton. In the early 1800s, mills in Britain and the American Northeast could turn raw cotton into fabric faster than ever. Most of that cotton was grown by enslaved people.

Historian Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton shows how deep the dependence ran. Enslaved people picked about 80 percent of the cotton spun in British mills, and Manchester’s cotton capitalists reinvested their profits in the Industrial Revolution. In the United States, southern planters shipped their cotton north, and northern bankers, insurers, and shippers profited from the trade. Economists debate how much slavery drove industrial growth overall. The mills’ dependence on slave-grown cotton is well documented.

The sewing machine, patented by Isaac Singer in 1851, changed how fast a garment could be made. Mechanized spinning and weaving had already made cloth cheaper. Together they made clothing faster and cheaper to produce than ever before.

The Women Who Sewed
By 1900, much of the work of making women’s clothing was done in the lofts of lower Manhattan, by young immigrant women. The hours were long and the pay was low. In 1909, the shirtwaist makers went on strike. Many shops settled. The workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company went back without an agreement, and their demands, including unlocked doors and working fire escapes, were never met.

On March 25, 1911, a fire broke out on the upper floors of the Triangle factory. It burned about eighteen minutes. An exit door was locked, the single fire escape buckled, and the firefighters’ ladders could not reach the upper floors. In all, 146 people died, 123 of them women. Most of the victims were immigrant women between 16 and 23.

The owners were tried for manslaughter and acquitted. Prosecutors argued that the owners knew a door was locked. The defense argued they did not, and the jury agreed. Within three years, the owners settled the families’ civil suits for about $75 per victim. Their insurance had paid them roughly $400 per victim.

Something did come of it. That October, New York passed a fire prevention law, and over the following decades the garment workers’ union grew into one of the largest in the country.

Ready-to-Wear and the New Customer
In the 1900s, New York became the birthplace of ready-to-wear. With department stores and mass production, fashion was no longer reserved for the elite. It was open to the growing American middle class.

Women had entered the workforce, earned their own incomes, and become the industry’s key market. Italian houses scaled up too. Italy’s garment exports rose from €800 million in 1970 to around €20 billion in 1990.

She finally had access. Even though, she still had no seat in deciding what she was offered.

When It Worked
For a few decades, it worked. The American garment industry employed millions, and the women who sewed in it were organized. Their union won contracts, health care, and cooperative housing. The work was skilled, and it was done here, in plants where the makers could bargain over what they were paid and how they were treated. Then the work moved. Not because the workers failed, but because the same garment could be made far cheaper somewhere else.

The scale was real. By the late 1960s the ladies’ garment union alone counted about 450,000 members, and in 1973 more than 2.4 million Americans worked in textiles and apparel.

Polyester, Offshoring, and Fast Fashion
Polyester was developed by British scientists in the early 1940s and reached consumers in the 1950s. It was sold on convenience: durable, wrinkle-resistant, wash-and-wear. For a woman with a full day and a pile of laundry, that was a real gain. For decades it rose and fell in fashion’s regard. By the 1990s it had become the staple ingredient of fast fashion. Scholars put it plainly: fast fashion would not exist without synthetic fabrics.

At the same time, the work kept moving. A 1997 review by the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that an apparel worker in Honduras earned about 10 percent of the hourly wage of a comparable American worker, and named lower labor cost as the primary incentive for moving production. Between 1990 and 2018, American apparel manufacturing lost 91 percent of its production jobs, falling to about 81,000.

Fast fashion followed: a quicker turnaround of new styles, more collections a year, and lower prices. Between 2000 and 2015, clothing production roughly doubled, from about 50 billion garments to more than 100 billion. Worth’s seasonal calendar had become something close to a conveyor belt.

The Ledger
A system like this runs on trades. Someone gets the gain. Someone carries the cost. Here is what the cost looks like, written down once, in one place.

Labor
The enslaved people who grew the cotton. The shirtwaist makers who died in a factory with a locked door. And in 2013, the workers at Rana Plaza.

On April 23, 2013, deep cracks were found in the eight-story Rana Plaza building in Savar, outside Dhaka. It was evacuated. The next day, more than 3,600 garment workers, 80 percent of them women aged twenty or younger, were ordered back in for their usual thirteen to fourteen hour shift. The building collapsed. More than 1,100 people died. A century apart, the circumstances were close to the same: a warning, and a building full of young women.

Today the minimum wage for a Bangladeshi garment worker is 12,500 taka, about $113 a month, set in December 2023 after a wave of strikes. Swedwatch calculates that this is only 38 percent of a living wage. Clean Clothes Campaign’s latest assessment of 110 brands found that 32 percent had made a living wage commitment, and only 4 percent reported tangible progress toward one.

The Planet
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s 2017 report puts numbers on it. Textile production emitted 1.2 billion tones of greenhouse gases in 2015, more than all international flights and maritime shipping combined. Dyeing and textile treatments accounts for about 20 percent of industrial water pollution globally.

At the end of a garment’s life, 73 percent of its material is landfilled or incinerated. Less than 1 percent is recycled into new clothing, a loss of more than $100 billion in materials each year. More than half of fast fashion is disposed of in under a year.

The Body
In 1939, a federal study measured nearly fifteen thousand American women and built a sizing logic around the hourglass, a shape only a small share of women actually have. The women measured were not a cross-section of the country. The government withdrew its sizing standard in 1983 and never replaced it. The result is a system in which the average American woman cannot buy a single size that fits her bust, her hip, and her waist. The full story is in “Twenty-Four Inches.”

The Age
A 2000 study found that the advertising industry persistently focused on the youth market, and that by ignoring older people, or reducing them to caricature, it missed a commercial opportunity as well as an ethical one. Marketers rarely see a brief aimed outside ages 26 to 55. A research fellow at the International Longevity Centre describes fashion as an industry where older women feel excluded, because of how consistently younger women dominate the advertising they see.

None of this required a villain. It required a system that sent the gain to one place and the cost to another, and kept the two far apart.

That also means it can change. It has before.

Who Decides Today
The chain is longer than most of us realize, and it starts before we ever see a collection.

Trend forecasting agencies work eighteen to twenty-four months ahead of the season, studying color, fabric, and runway data, then selling that forecast to brands. Designers translate it into collections, often interpreting a direction someone else already set. Buyers narrow it further, deciding which forecasted directions get produced at scale, based on what sold last time.

Social media has added speed. A single video can surface a trend before any forecaster planned for it, and brands now watch for those moments and manufacture toward them in weeks. In that sense, anyone can spark a moment. But it still runs through the same handful of manufacturers with the capacity to produce and distribute fast.

Who It’s Built For
The industry’s design target and its customer have rarely been the same woman.

The muse, the body every pattern and grade rule is built around, is roughly five foot nine, a size 0 to 4, in her teens or twenties, her body maintained as a full time profession, dressed by someone else for events where the clothes only need to look good in a photograph.

The woman who pays is roughly five foot three, wears a size 16 to 18, is anywhere from her thirties to her sixties, and beyond, and needs the garment to survive a commute, a full workday, and everything after it.

Every pattern flows from the first woman. Every invoice is paid by the second. The revenue tells the same story: the largest fashion houses draw much of their income from bags, jewelry, and fragrance, categories where fit barely enters the equation. Consumption and labor in this industry are overwhelmingly women. Leadership is not.

Where This Leaves Us
Follow the money up the chain and you reach a mill, a label, a brand. Follow it down and you reach one woman at a register, or a screen, with a card in her hand.

She did not ask for any of this. She did not choose the mill, the factory, the calendar, or the fabric. But every link above her is paid by what she spends. The system has always counted on her money. It has rarely asked what she wants.

So here is the question the industry rarely asks, and the next essay does: what does she want, and what can her money do?