Who Made My Clothes?

The Biggest Team You've Never Met

Grab the nearest T-shirt and check the label. It'll tell you where the shirt was made — but not a single thing about who made it. That's strange, because a real person guided that fabric through a sewing machine. Someone with a name, a family, and probably a favourite song.

The International Labour Organization (the UN's agency for work and jobs) estimates that between 60 and 75 million people work in the global textile, clothing and footwear industry. That's close to the population of the whole UK — an entire country's worth of people, sewing.

And here's the part that surprises most shoppers: the large majority of them are women, most of them young. Campaign groups like the Clean Clothes Campaign put the figure at roughly three in four. Many are in their late teens or twenties — not much older than you.

So the person who made your hoodie probably isn't a robot or a mysterious machine. She's more likely a young woman on a sewing line, one of millions, doing skilled work at serious speed. This lesson is about making her visible.

The World Map Inside Your Wardrobe

If you flipped every label in your closet, you'd end up with a pretty good geography quiz. China still makes more clothing than any other country. Bangladesh and Vietnam usually come next, followed by big producers like India, Turkey, and Cambodia, with newer hubs in Africa and Southeast Asia appearing as brands hunt for lower costs.

Some of these places depend on clothing in a huge way. In Bangladesh, garments make up over 80% of everything the country exports, and the industry employs around four million people. Whole neighbourhoods of Dhaka, the capital, wake up every morning to make clothes for shoppers on the other side of the world.

Next time you're in Dubai Mall — home to more than 1,200 shops — remember that almost nothing on those racks was made nearby. Most of it travelled by ship and truck from factories thousands of kilometres away.

Why those countries? Wages are lower, workforces are large, and governments have built whole economies around exporting clothes. That's brought real benefits — millions of jobs, especially for women — but it also means the people making our clothes live very far from the people wearing them. And distance makes people easy to forget.

A Day on the Sewing Line

So what's it actually like inside a garment factory? Picture a huge, bright hall filled with hundreds of sewing machines arranged in long lines. Each worker does one small job — attaching a collar, hemming a sleeve, sewing a pocket — over and over, hundreds of times a shift. The garment moves down the line, getting more finished at every station.

It's genuinely skilled work. An experienced machinist can sew a perfect seam in seconds, and each line has hourly targets to hit. Shifts often run eight to ten hours, longer in busy seasons before big shopping events. There are lunch breaks, friendships, jokes shouted across the machines — and pay day, which for many young women is the first money they've ever earned themselves, often supporting parents or paying a sibling's school fees.

It's not all hopeful, though. In many garment hubs, wages sit below what researchers call a living wage, and overtime can be exhausting.

Here's the odd part: you'll never see any of this. Brands almost never print factory names on labels, and many still don't publish full factory lists at all. The sewing line stays invisible — unless somebody asks.

Ask the Question: #WhoMadeMyClothes

On 24 April 2013, the Rana Plaza building collapsed in Dhaka, Bangladesh, killing more than 1,100 garment workers. People around the world suddenly realised they had no idea who made their clothes — and two designers, Carry Somers and Orsola de Castro, founded Fashion Revolution to change that. Their campaign asks brands one simple question: who made my clothes?

Every April, during Fashion Revolution Week, people post photos of their clothing labels and tag the brand with #WhoMadeMyClothes. Some brands now reply with photos of real workers saying "I made your clothes." It works because it's polite, public, and hard to ignore.

You can start this week:

1. Pick one item you're wearing and find the brand's social account or contact page. 2. Ask, politely and publicly: "I love this hoodie — who made it?" 3. Check whether the brand publishes a factory list on its website. Transparency is a choice.

If you use the Rewoven app, scan the label first and look at the brand's Labor and Transparency grades — you'll sound like you've done your homework, because you have.

One question from one student is easy to skip. The same question from thousands of students isn't.