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Now, this essay in many ways is about what happened when COVID-19 intersected with existing forces of organized abandonment that characterize the landscape of fashion labor.

And it's also a call to readers to think of fashion production as part of the carceral continuum,

and the conditions of garment production is an issue of global public health.

You know, what we sort of saw is that some of the ways that these labor relationships were

set up between manufacturing and design, where you kind of have the European or American brand

that contracts out its labor

to factories, you know, for piecework all over the place where maybe, you know, you're going to

have, let's say, for example, like Tommy Hilfiger will probably have like, you know,

dozen factories depending on sort of what garment type is being produced. They'll have all these

different contracts, but that a lot of the contracts with being produced, they'll have all these different contracts,

but that a lot of the contracts with these factories, they have clauses that are built into

them that are incredibly favorable to the designer that really put the factory on the hook

for pretty much all of the financial risk.

And then there's this, you know, beyond that, the sort of fact of COVID-19 immediately

sort of slowing down retail consumption. And brands responded to that by exercising these

very favorable clauses in their contracts and who's really paying at the end of the day,

as this is sort of going down in early 2020,

are the workers themselves, many of whom were basically then without pay, without sick coverage.

And the response is kind of like a social media response that starts to bubble up.

But before we get into that, could you talk a little bit about sort of what these relationships

are, for example, between brands and factories and then how that played out for workers

...