Planet Money showing just how little the industry has changed.
What would you like the people who buy this t-shirt to know about you?
Doris Restrepo, Garment Worker, Medellín, Colombia:
What is behind the T-shirt: It’s a world.
NPR’s Planet Money has released a five chapter series on the production of a conventional t-shirt. This series is an excellent educational resource and is perfect for ‘flipping’ into a short course on our international fashion system. The videos and accompanying articles would also make a fantastic addition to any of SA’s educational resources, particularly the SAGE module where we traced the international production of a hypothetical t-shirt from the farm to the landfill and beyond into it’s second-hand life.
Introducing: Planet Money Makes A T-Shirt from NPR on Vimeo.
Inspired by Pietra Rivoli‘s The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade, Planet Money actually hired the Georgetown Professor as an advisor for this series. Needless to say, I highly recommend the The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy as further reading to help gain even deeper insight into the value chain of a ‘simple’ t-shirt.
This series is an absolute must for anyone interested in the fashion supply chain as a whole and the political, economic, and social issues that surround the production of clothing.
Planet Money Makes a T-Shirt: The world behind a simple shirt, in five chapters