#soulsideout

Photo courtesy of Susie Taylor

  WASHINGTON-- Do you know where your clothes come from? Think beyond the store you bought them in. Your receipt might say Forever 21, but the clothing tag says otherwise. What does “Made in Bangladesh” really mean? One D.C. local can tell you about the high costs of cheap fashion.

Susie Taylor, a Bloomingdale resident and creator of The OM Project wants to bring attention to the bottom of the fast fashion supply chain-- the factory workers. The women and men that work in unsafe conditions for far below minimum wage produce clothing quickly and cheaply enough that large retailers are able to sell the goods at an incredibly low price. Most shoppers are unaware of the other costs involved with buying cheap clothes. However, in the wake of recent events-- like the Rana Plaza factory collapse -- many people are looking to buy sweatshop-free.

Enter The OM Project. “The One More (OM) Project” aims to create fair employment opportunities as well as empower female entrepreneurs. This is not a charity. Taylor believes that personal empowerment lasts much longer than donations. The OM Bag, a large tote made of plant fibers and repurposed saris, is handmade by Bangladeshi women working in fair, safe conditions. Taylor’s goal is to turn “Made in Bangladesh” into a positive thing.

Taylor and one of her assistant project managers polled people outside of an H&M one weekend, curious to see how far back people could trace their fast fashion. What they found wasn’t surprising. “It was interesting to see some people immediately get very nervous that we were talking to them and become even more transparent than a normal person would be, just putting themselves out there”, says Taylor. Shoppers confessed to not checking their labels, and not knowing what went into the creation of their clothes. But she’s not trying to shame them.

“You know, there’s a very common saying that if we were to do everything right, we’d all be naked and hungry. And there’s a good point there,” she says, “My recommendation is to shop where you have goods from local artists and you can possibly learn what creative process they went through to make it”. Otherwise, do what you can. “Long story short, I think people, if they have a choice, they want to care”, says Taylor.

She recommends a book called “Confessions of an Eco-Sinner” for those looking to learn more about sustainability and production at the bottom of the supply chain. The book, by journalist Fred Pearce, follows several household goods he takes for granted from raw material to finished product. “It’s a great book because you realize how many hands things pass through and how little money is made on the way, until it lands in our retail stores,” says Taylor.

With the OM Bag, Taylor and the OM Project hope to topple this unbalanced pyramid of profit. The OM model is smart: pair an established, trustworthy manufacturer with a growing female entrepreneur, and develop a mutually beneficial relationship between the two. In the case of the OM Bag, Taylor and the project brought together Saidpur Enterprises and SourceFK , two Bangladeshi employers with a commitment to ethical business practices.

Saidpur Enterprises has been operating for over 40 years, paying its workers a daily minimum wage, with the ability to earn more-- essentially impossible at factories like Rana Plaza. According to Taylor, Saidpur Enterprises has helped lift an entire generation of displaced refugees out of poverty. “They went from living in refugee camps along the Indian border, to a generation where children are literally graduating with higher education degrees.” For someone like Taylor, who’s been to Bangladesh and seen the tragedy of factory life firsthand, the success of Saidpur Enterprises is uplifting.

The real struggle is changing the business practices of bigger manufacturers. According to Taylor, the power lies with the people. “What we want to do with the OM project is what women's groups are doing around the world-- standing up to say that it is your peer group and and it’s my peer group that can stand up and flex our muscles. We have serious purchasing power together. This may be on the other side of the world, it may be an out of sight out of mind thing, but if we handle ourselves well, we seek to find out what’s going on, we’ll realize that when we demand that artisan goods become more readily available they'll become cheaper because demand for them will grow up. And when we say ‘H&M i love that you recycle the same shit every month in a different color, but I really don’t want to buy it’, they’ll stop being able to sell it so cheaply.”

To help potential sweatshop-free consumers get started, Taylor says comparing clothes to food is the way to go.

“What I hope that people do this year is to start to conceptualize their clothing the way that we are beginning to conceptualize our food-- you wouldn’t put hydrogenated oils and estrogen into your body all day every day if you knew what it was doing to you. Same thing-- you wouldn’t put those threads anywhere near your skin if you knew where they came from.”