slowclothes: julio 2009

sábado, julio 4

Chullos and the right price

When it takes 6 weeks to make a hat of this kind how can you convince the buyer, that he is paying for 6 weeks work from the last few people knowing this knitting technique? How do you make the price.

I will be selling this hats and I'm trying to figure out what the right price is. I know what they cost in the making of course, but what will be the buyers be paying? I need to pay the transport of course and the import and earn something but most important, I would like to earn enough to be able to give the money back to the producers in the form of help for the school of textile art, to get electric light in their homes so they can knit at night and so on. Am I an utopist?

I admire the work of Maiwa Textiles in Canada very much. They say: "You may think that slow clothes would be prohibitively expensive to make. It is not true. The fact is that mass produced clothes (jeans for example) have production costs of a few dollars per item, yet consumers pay high prices for designer wear. What is missing is an understanding of the real costs of clothing and an appreciation of their value"

Anybody for suggestions?

Who's making the clothes we are wearing?

While in the past centurys mostly women manufactured in homework all the clothing needs for their families, now they have been luckyly freed from this chores. But the machine that sews the clothes for itself without the human hands and abilities has not been invented jet. So now the women in rich countrys are not making the clothes anymore but it would be wrong to beleave that this is a progress for all. The work just was delegated to millions of poor women and men working in sweat shops everywhere in the third world. I understand that we cannot come back to making everything ourselves but we can learn to apreciate this hard work that is beeing done for us through learning how it is done and or getting somehow in contact with the people working for us. Knowing the faces behind our clothes. When we do this, we will probably have a hard time just buying a nice fashionable skirt for little money only to throw it away at the end of the season. That would be a good day for all. And the fashion industry alltogether will have to rethink their ever faster changeing tendencys.