Blood and Rubble: Williamsburg Fashion Weekend S/S 2014

Four months and twenty days before 11 designers debuted their latest collection on the stage at the venue Villain on North 3rd St for Williamsburg Fashion Weekend, garment workers in Bangladesh were ordered to return to work in a building that was already beginning to show signs of structural failure serious enough to keep the other businesses in it shuttered.  It collapsed shortly thereafter, causing 1,129 individual humans to be crushed and suffocated by concrete and rubble.

Arthur Arbit, the local tailor who started Williamsburg Fashion Weekend in 2006, opened this year’s event by pointing out that there is no way to produce a $15 blouse for H&M without the garment being soaked in someone’s blood; this year it may be appropriate to adjust that to say that there’s rubble in the pockets of your Levi’s.  Arthur’s event provides copious evidence that industrial fashion, although difficult to avoid, is not our only option. Continue reading →