Fashion and its refugees: towards a transnational worker solidarity and labour citizenship

The exploitation of cheapened migrant and refugee labour has always been central to the material production of fashion. The so-called refugee crisis, when it comes to much of the urban garment industry, is not a crisis, but a key, endemic feature and facilitator of an extreme form of flexibility, which is defined by low skill needs, high seasonal fluctuations and extensive subcontracting, and has remained at the heart of the characteristically volatile fashion production ever since the late-nineteenth-century period of growth to today. Despite this, the concept of ‘refugee’ has not moved to the forefront of Fashion Studies and journalism — it is still being understood and treated as an exceptional and extraordinary matter of descriptive and legal significance: a product of forced migration, displacement and an overall, so-called crisis. Drawing upon Hannah Arendt’s idea that refugees ‘driven from country to country represent the vanguard’ (1943, p. 274) of all stateless and displaced people, of all racialised and marginalised Others, this paper will aim to expand the meaning of ‘the refugee’ a) as a recurrent element of the multitude embraced by what Karl Marx calls ‘the disposable industrial army’, that is, ‘a mass of human material always ready for exploitation’ (1990 [1867], p. 547) to satisfy the changing needs of the self-expansion of capital, especially during periods of crisis, and b) as a political identity that exposes the structurally exclusive —and no longer sustainable — character of the nation-state as a racialised and territorial myth of European construction. Focusing on the centrality of refugee labour to clothing production in Turkey and the UK, this paper will explore the possibilities of cross-border worker solidarity, transnational unionism and what Jennifer Gordon calls ‘transnational labour citizenship’, that is, ‘an opening up of the fortress of labour and of the nation-state to accommodate a constant flow of new migrants through a model that would tie immigration status to membership in organizations of transnational workers rather than to a particular employer’ (2007, p. 509).