Wakeup Call: 3 Fashion bloggers experience life in a Cambodian sweatshop
updated the 14 July 2015 à 18:32Ever wondered what goes on in the factories that make your high-street branded clothes? Follow these Norwegian bloggers as they share their experience working in one.
As mass consumption rapidly soars and the desire for fast fashion climbs, the fashion industry is forced to churn out an ever increasing number of clothes to feed the demand. At the same time, large retailers have their business models centered around profit making but cannot do so by slapping a high price point on their good either. The solution? Keep costs low by outsourcing to manufacturing countries like India, Bangladesh and Cambodia, resulting in what we now effectively know as sweatshops – defined by cramped conditions, weak ventilation and long work shifts.
Basically sweatshops are not the most friendly of spaces to be working in. To highlight that, three Norwegian fashion bloggers, Anniken, Frida and Ludwig, packed up to experience life working in a Cambodian sweatshop for a month. The series, aptly titled, ‘Sweatshop’, follows the bloggers as they spend long excruciating hours in factories to produce clothes for international high-street brands. Their lives were swapped from being on the guest list of parties in Oslo to not being able to afford toothbrushes and living in houses that were smaller than their lavish bedrooms.
Sweatshops are essentially ticking time bombs as well when the building itself has been poorly built. Take for instance, the 2013 Rana Plaza Building collapse in Bangladesh causing over a thousand deaths and leaving thousands more injured. Despite noticing cracks in the walls, garment factory workers were forced to return to work, in order to meet tight deadlines imposed by brands.
Essentially, fashion is constantly propped up by a glamourous facade but the darker side of it remains hidden – this is the time to shine some blistering light. By the end of the television series, the bloggers saw this ‘social experiment’ as a true wakeup call and Anniken and Frida became activists to champion the cause for better work conditions.
What do you think? Can sweatshops become a thing of the past?
The entire season of Sweatshop is available to watch on Aftenposten.
Tarandip Kaur
