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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
4
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
4
"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.