ABSTRACT
This chapter explores as the division of labor in fast-fashion families, which must bring together creative forms of knowledge in both design and garment work, across a collective, social community, to make creative and rapidly changing fashions in such precarious global chains of production. Made in Los Angeles, a documentary produced in 2007, is one such example—the story of three Latina immigrants who wage battle against their employer, a Los Angeles garment factory who produces for the Korean American–owned fast-fashion retailer Forever 21. The anti-fast-fashion rhetoric is often laced with racism and is most certainly class-based, spinning narratives that dangerously mythologize the link between the consumption of luxury and conscious shopping with the making of happy garment workers in raised living standards and wages. Media attention attributed fast fashion to the top-down “process innovations” at big companies like Inditex, the parent company of Zara and the world’s largest—but hardly most typical—fast-fashion retailer.
