Where Do Our Clothes Come From

7/28/2019 Where Do Our Clothes Come From

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Arthur Elwin 25/5/2013

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Table of Contents

Introduction.........................................................................................................................................pg 3

Map of the World ...............................................................................................................................pg 4

Personal Results..................................................................................................................................pg 5

Method................................................................................................................................................pg 6

Analysing Data....................................................................................................................................pg 7

Conclusion........................................................................................................................................pg 11

Evaluation.........................................................................................................................................pg 11

Appendix...........................................................................................................................................pg 12




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Where do our clothes come from?Case Study

For years we have simply taken for granted the clothes that we wear yet when you think about, clothes

do not simply appear out of nowhere they are made somewhere, but where? Now think, have you ever

seen the label on one of your pieces of clothing and how many times did it say made in China? So the

aim of this case study is to discover where our clothes are manufactured, in particular the grouping of

{North America, Europe, Oceania and Japan}-developed countries, {Africa, West Asia, South and to

look into any America, Southeast Asia, East Asia}-developing countries trends that appear over the

course of the investigation.

So I believe that we can predict that many of our clothes are made in developing countries due to the

fact that the companies making these clothes do not live to make to clothes but rather to make a profit.

Today in many developed countries the price of manual labour can be very high for example in theUK the minimal wage in the UK is 7.4 Euros per hour 2 yet in comparison the minimum wage in

Bangladesh is 5 cents per hour 3! Due to this miniscule price clothes companies are far more likely to

get the clothes manufactured in these countries rather than in a more developed country and also the

safety regulations not nearly as high so with this in mind if the companies are out to make a profit

(which essentially every company is) then they would probably manufacture their clothes in these

developing countries.

Another alternative to this theory though would be the fact that potentially the clothes companies may

want to produce clothes more locally, so in the more developed countries where they are based, for a

few less likely but possible reasons, the first would once again be profit, if they created the clothes

close to the company then the shipping fee would be completely gotten rid of, as well as this then if

they wanted to market their clothes as „quality‟ clothes then it would sound far better if they were

created in a developed country as a pose to a developing country.

The concept of globalization is that formerly countries used to care only for themselves and as such

made everything that they needed in their own country for example they would grow all of the food

that they needed in their country or create all of the clothes that they needed and never for a moment

considered other countries. Globalization is a shift in this mentality where countries now trade with

each other to a point where various different countries now depend on each other to survive. This can

be both a blessing and a curse as it means countries are unlikely to war with each other anymore

because they have too much to lose yet means countries rely on each other a great deal. Alsoglobalization is when it takes multiple countries to produce a single product which relates directly to

this topic of clothing and where our clothes are manufactured today.

2 "Minimum Wage to Increase to £6.31." BBC News. BBC, 15 Apr. 2013. Web. 03 June 2013.

3 Bradford, Harry. "Bangladesh To Raise Minimum Wage For Garment Workers." The Huffington Post . TheHuffingtonPost.com, 12

May 2013. Web. 01 June 2013.




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Map of the World

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Over the course of this case study we would be looking primarily into the groupings of North America

(Canada, USA, and Alaska), Europe, Oceania and Japan, Africa, West Asia , South America,

Southeast Asia, East Asia and West Asia

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"Free Pictures Online." Free Pictures Online RSS . N.p., n.d. Web. 03 June 2013.




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Method

Tools:

Camera

Clothes

Blindfold

Assistant

Pen

Paper

1) Place around 20-30 pieces of different types of clothing on the floor of a room. Makesure there are pants, shirts, dresses, shorts, T-shirts, jackets, jeans etc.

2) Ask a friend or family member to blindfold you. They will then give you instructions to pick 10 different pieces of clothing at random. For example your friend could stand with their back to the clothing on the floor and ask you to take 2 steps to the left. At this point pick up

the clothing item under your right foot. If you are standing on two items then select the itemthat occupies the largest area of your foot. Next they will call again for example “one step tothe right and one step in front of you”. Repeat this until you have 10 clothing items.

3) Photograph all pieces of clothing as well as the label showing the origin of the clothing.

4) Make a collage of your pictures of the clothes and labels.

5) Collect together the information from a variety of sources and mark in down in a table.

This method has a few flaws that will be addressed in my evaluation but should be able to narrow

down some facts about specifically where our clothes are manufactured and should be an extremely

unbiased test giving us some very trustworthy data.




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Personal Results

T-shirt-China

T-shirt-China

T-shirt-Thailand

T-shirt-Britain

T- shirt-America

Jumper-America

Jumper-China

Jumper-Taiwan

Jumper-Thailand

Trousers-China

Trousers-Thailand

Trousers-India

Trousers-Britain

Coat-Britain

Shoes-India

Suit-Germany

Sorry that there are no pictures are shown but my colour printer is almost entirely out of ink so it

would be for the best if I only had to print of my graphs in colour, alternatively I can send them to

you.




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Analysis

So the final results of the investigation in a broad sense were in some ways very conclusive and in

other ways very confusing.

As we can clearly see in the graph the vast majority of clothes are manufactured in developing

countries as a pose to developed countries at an approximately 85-15%. So the first trend that I

believe is easy to identify is the broad idea of is how over 80% of the clothes that were found over the

course of this investigation were created in developing countries and this can be seen particularly well

if you observe figure 2. There are in my opinion a few key reasons for this. The first and foremost

reason is that as I stated in my first hypothesis is that the companies responsible for your clothes arenot trying to make people happy but rather trying to make a profit, now the whole idea of profit is

based around the idea of spending as little money as possible to reap as large benefits as possible, in

these developed countries it costs 1/150th the cost to pay someone in Bangladesh in comparison to

Britain and so they target these places where they can pay the workers so little and yet make the same

quality clothes. As well as this the standards of work and living are far better in developed countries

so the companies in question would have to spend more on health insurance and healthy working

conditions. So this means that the companies in question would not only have to pay the workers

more every hour and give them extra things such as health care and holidays but would also get less

work out of them because they would not work nearly as long as people in developing countries. To

sum all of this up simply in 2007 a statistic was released showing that 95% of all clothesmanufactured by Nike5 were made in developing countries!

5 "Do You Care Where Your Clothes Are Made?" BBC News. BBC, 26 Apr. 2013. Web. 01 June 2013.

Developed Countries

Developing Countries

Where are our clothes manufactured (developed countries vs developingcountries)?




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Countries Total Amount of Clothes Produced

Africa 30

West Asia 81

South

America 40

Southeast

Asia 99

East Asia 122

Now we must narrow it down to simply the developing countries and how many clothes are produced

in these areas, so if we observe figures three and four we can see a few clear trends. The first and

broadest of these trends is the amount of our clothes that come from Asia specifically, once again

there are most likely a few key reasons why for some inexplicable reason our clothes seem to be

manufactured in Asia as a pose to Africa or South America. The first of these reasons is mainly to

explain the difference between Africa and Asia, the main one being they are both at very different

spectrums of the „developing‟ scale with Africa being a population that still has very few cars, is

extremely little in the way of technology (generalizing) and limited education. Yet in comparison

many developing countries in Asia really are developing economies and as such better suit the needsof the companies in question, as well as this a lot of the natural resources already needed for creating

these clothes can be found in Asia and as such do not need to be imported from so far away,

meanwhile with Africa the resources are very limited and once again it would cost more for the

TNC‟s. Then moving onto why more clothes seem to be developed in Asia as a pose to in South

America, one obvious reason is that Asia simply has a far higher population than South America and

as such can produce more clothes and also I believe we may see very different results were to look at

students clothes from North America, Asia is Europe‟s natural neighbour and as such commerce is

more likely between the two continents and with North and South America so this may be a

contributing factor to our data.

Africa

West Asia

South America

Southeast Asia

East Asia

Where are our clothes manufactured (developing countries/continents)?




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Countries Total Clothes

North America 16

Europe 52

Oceania and

Japan 6

In figues five and six (above) we can see that Europe is obviously selling the most clothes out of thedeveloped countries, with North America at second place and with Oceania and Japan selling th least

clothes out of the developed countries. So a more minor trend to look into here in figures five and six

is how seemingly Europe is the developed continent that sells the most clothes but I believe this is

similar to how Asia seemingly outputs far more clothes than South America, I merely believe it to be

due to a smaller population on the part of North America and Japan/Oceania and also the fact that the

people who took the survey currently live in Germany and as such are far more likely to own

European clothes than any other developed country.

The final trend to observe (if it can even be called a trend) that cannot fully be explained is where

specific types of clothes are manufactured for example South East Asia creates the most t-shirts

meanwhile East Asia creates by far the most jackets and in my honest opinion I do not believe this can

be explained with the number of people we surveyed and also I believe it is really down to a specific

period of time, at one point in time say 2008 shoe manufacturing was very popular in China and yet

today it has changed to be more popular in Thailand6, so it really depends on where the TNC‟s believe

they can make the most profit!

6 D'Innocenzio, Anne. "It's Incredibly Difficult To Prove That Clothing Is 'Ethically Made'" Business Insider . N.p., 1 May 2013. Web.

01 June 2013.

North America

Europe

Oceania and Japan

Where are our clothes manufactured (developed countries/continents)?




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So now we must wonder what this shows about specifically our test demographic of ninth graders and

our buying patterns yet once again I would say the answer to this is elusive, it could be claimed that

the primary developed continent that we buy clothing from is Europe yet this varies from place to

place so I would say the only completely correct fact that we can analyse from this jumble of facts is

that it is primarily less economically developed or „developing countries‟ that make the vast majority

of our clothing.




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Conclusion

So to conclude on this topic we must start by answering our field work question of „where are our

clothes manufactured?‟. To answer this question in a broad sense then I would say we abuse

developing countries every day, around 80-90% of all our clothes are made in these developing

countries and though this has been proven a thousand times over TNC‟s continue to abuse them. Thenif we look deeper we can see most of our clothes are created specifically in Asia for a variety of

reasons I have already discussed so I can now clearly see that my first hypothesis that stated that most

of the clothes would be created in developing countries was entirely correct and while in some ways

correct for the most part my second hypothesis of Europe being the largest manufacturer of our

clothes was inaccurate.

Evaluation

I believe that the method of collecting the data meant that the data we collected was very unbiasedthough I do believe there were a few glaring holes in the method, these can essentially be summed up

with a single word, scale. First of the amount of data we collected was not enough to create a solid

conclusion on some of the more intricate points we looked into and so were we to do this again it

would be invaluable to increase to amount of people we surveyed to one thousand or more if possible,

also all of the people we surveyed for this investigation lived at the time in Germany yet had we

increased the range of people we surveyed to say Asia, America, Australia, etc then we could have

come up with far more varied and importantly conclusive answers to our fieldwork question.




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Appendix

Figure 1

Figure 2

0

50

100

150

200

250

300

350

400

450

East Asia

Southeast Asia

South America

West Asia

Africa

Oceania and Japan

Europe

North America

Developed Countries

Developing Countries




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Figure 3

Countries Total Amount of Clothes Produced

Africa 30

West Asia 81South

America 40

SoutheastAsia 99

East Asia 122

Figure 4

Figure 5

Countries Total Clothes

North America 16

Europe 52

Oceania and

Japan 6

Africa

West Asia

South America

Southeast Asia

East Asia




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Figure 6

Figure 7

Figure 8

North America

Europe

Oceania and Japan




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Works Cited

"Global Policy Forum." Globalization. N.p., n.d. Web. 01 June 2013.

Smith M.K, and M. Doyle. "Globalization: Theory and Experience." Infedorg . N.p., 2002. Web. 01 June 2013.

"TED Case Studies." NIKE and Child Labor . N.p., n.d. Web. 01 June 2013.

Clifford, Stephanie. "Some Retailers Say More About Their Clothing‟s Origins." NY Times. N.p., 8 May 2013.

Web. 3 June 2013.

"Do You Care Where Your Clothes Are Made?" BBC News. BBC, 26 Apr. 2013. Web. 01 June

2013.

D'Innocenzio, Anne. "It's Incredibly Difficult To Prove That Clothing Is 'Ethically Made'" Business Insider .

N.p., 1 May 2013. Web. 01 June 2013.

"Where Have Your Clothes Been?" Chick'd Athletic Apparel . N.p., n.d. Web. 01 June 2013.

Mayyasi, Erica. "Gift Some Style: Tips for Donating Your Clothing." SheKnows Cares RSS . N.p., 20

Jan. 2012. Web. 03 June 2013.

"Minimum Wage to Increase to £6.31." BBC News. BBC, 15 Apr. 2013. Web. 03 June 2013.

Bradford, Harry. "Bangladesh To Raise Minimum Wage For Garment Workers." The Huffington

Post . TheHuffingtonPost.com, 12 May 2013. Web. 01 June 2013.

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