New York Fashion Week is upon us, and we are watching street style and fed trend after trend for this coming year. Businesses follow suit, creating fast fashion, consumer versions of runway looks. Globally, fashion is a $1.7 trillion dollar industry, one of the most lucrative in the world. But who are the hands that make the clothing that fill department stores and arrive in plastic packages to our doorsteps? Beyond the glitz and glamour of runways and fashion weeks, the labor of the garment workers is obscured behind labels of brand houses and fast fashion companies. Garment workers across the Third World, from Bangladesh to Angola, are the backbone of the global fashion supply chain.
Fashion transcends borders and influences cultures worldwide, showcasing the beauty and creativity of humanity, but to further understand fashion, is to also recognize the exploitative nature of the fashion industry under capitalism.
Join us on September 27th for Part 1 of Material Liberation fashion show’s political education series as we learn about the political economy of the global fashion industry. See here for all Material Liberation events.
Kerbie Joseph is a first generation Haitian woman from Brooklyn, NY- first becoming community organizer with the ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) Coalition at the age of 19- organizing against police brutality, mass incarceration, housing insecurity and LGBTSTGNC oppression. Kerbie has organized and led campaigns in solidarity to police brutality and hate crime victims in coordination with the victims’ families- from cases like Akai Gurley to Deandre Matthews. Kerbie leads police brutality street naming for various families across NYC. Kerbie currently works at the Audre Lorde Project as the Safe OUTside the System program’s coordinator, where she does community engagement, political education and community safety work for LGBTSTGNC community members of color. Kerbie also designs unconventional clothing pieces; though the women in her family have always sewn, made garments, and weaved objects- it’s not until Kerbie started experiencing chronic pain, did she begin to design.
Tahia Islam is a community organizer and cultural worker from Queens, NYC born to Bangladeshi immigrants. Informed by growing up in one of the most diverse working class neighborhoods in the country, she has been committed to justice since the age of 16 and active in grassroots struggles from housing to K-12 education to food justice, through various campaigns, non-profit organizations, and local collectives. Tahia was the Education Coordinator at The People’s Forum developing political education and cultural programming to advance the building of the international working class movement. Tahia also worked with thrifted and vintage clothes for five years, and when not organizing or studying, styles artists. She is committed to uplifting the history of working class struggle, building socialist consciousness through art and culture, and fighting towards a world free from capitalism and imperialism.
