Fast fashion: The ugly side of looking good
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 3 July 2019
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The hunger for quick short-lived clothes is bringing garment sweatshops back to the UK and harming the environment. Katie Prescott travels to Leicester, the British city whose garment factories claimed to "clothe the world" a century ago, where unregulated factories are making a comeback, paying immigrant workers less than the minimum wage to turn around clothing designs as quickly as possible.
Meanwhile Manuela Saragosa speaks to author and journalist Lucy Siegle about how the trend towards the ever faster turnover in consumers' wardrobes is leading to shoddier synthetic fibres that only last a handful of wears.
(Photo: Woman sitting on a throne of discarded clothes. Credit: Ryan McVay/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC with me, Manuela Saragossa. |
| 0:06.8 | Coming up, fast fashion, the ugly side of looking good. |
| 0:10.7 | I asked how much they were paid. |
| 0:12.8 | Come die. |
| 0:14.8 | Well, she was reticent to tell me, but did say £6 an hour, well below the £8.21 minimum wage. |
| 0:21.1 | You won't see that on a catwalk. |
| 0:23.1 | We're talking about what fast fashion has done to the garment industry |
| 0:26.4 | and what it's doing to the environment. |
| 0:28.7 | The average piece, if you bought it today, you'll wear it seven times before discarding it. |
| 0:33.7 | And increasingly we're swapping natural fibres for plastic fibres because it's cheaper for the manufacturers. |
| 0:39.1 | That's going to be around for 500 years. |
| 0:41.7 | That's all here in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:47.8 | When someone mentions sweatshops and the fashion industry, you probably don't think of the city of Leicester. |
| 0:54.5 | Back in the 19th and 20th century, this English town claimed to clothe the world with its huge |
| 0:59.8 | textile industry. But then Leicester's garment sector went into decline as companies moved their |
| 1:05.0 | factories abroad to places with cheaper wages like Bangladesh and Vietnam, chasing the cheap needle |
| 1:10.6 | around the planet, as some experts put |
| 1:12.7 | it. In recent years, though, the textile industry has come back to Lester. And there's both |
| 1:17.8 | good and bad in that, as the BBC's Katie Prescott now reports. |
| 1:25.3 | In a shiny new factory in the heart of Lester's Textiles District, the bell sounds for break time. |
| 1:31.9 | In this light, airy space, workers at ethically sourced products limited are making polo shirts for a well-known British brand. |
| 1:39.2 | The managing director is Richard Olly. |
... |
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