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ABSTRACT
This article examines the relations of creativity, enterprise, and activism that define Aranya, a luxury fashion brand based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. It argues that these relations disrupt existing theorizations of the local and global in fashion scholarship, and help to undo the knowledge practices which position the global North as fashion’s centre. The brand is instructive for understandings of ethical and sustainable fashion because it reveals the interdependencies and productive engagements between diverse people and places that underpin sustainable fashion-making. These practices are described as ‘more than local’ because they embed mobile, intercultural relations of scale and reciprocity. It is argued that maintaining these relationships across scales is a form of labour that can generate intercultural knowledge and is integral to a model of entrepreneurship that can encompass generosity and solidarity.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. The #30wears hashtag refers to one of Firth’s campaigns, urging fashion consumers to have a more sustainable relationship to their clothing by wearing their purchases 30 times (Glamour Citation2019).
2. The women in the foreground of the image are not garment workers but leading figures from Bangladesh Mahila Parishad, a well-known women’s rights group who helped organize this action in 2013, and whose placards make reference to the mass rapes carried out against women during Bangladesh’s Liberation War (T.H. Riti 2020, personal communication, 2 November; Akhtar et al. Citation2013).
3. At the same time such ‘misrecognition’ is not surprising, and reiterates critiques of contact theory in which it is supposed that encounters with the Other necessarily lead to knowledge or understanding (Hopkins et al. Citation2017).
4. This pathologization of Bangladesh has a long history that is frequently traced to Henry Kissinger’s reported description of Bangladesh as ‘an international basketcase’ (Bari Citation2008).
5. Of the five remaining articles four discuss Bangladesh in the context of broader trends in Indian and South Asian fashion and one is about the impact of Ramadan on retail.
6. See Tu (Citation2011) and Pham (Citation2015) for more substantial critiques of this Orientalism in Western fashion discourse.
7. Despite Niessen’s earlier advocacy for a ‘broader, multicultural definition of fashion’ (Citation2016: 211), in this paper she reverts to narrow, historical definitions of fashion as a Western phenomenon (Niessen Citation2020b).
8. Over the last two decades this scholarly network has convened academic activity around the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies journal and its bi-annual conferences.
9. Fashion Revolution is a global activist organization that initiated the #whomademyclothes campaign in the wake of the 2013 Rana Plaza factory collapse.
10. A practice of female segregation and seclusion practiced in some Muslim communities.
11. The notion of a ‘living wage’ is defined as a fairer alternative to the ‘minimum wage’, which is often inadequate to cover workers’ basic needs and keeps them living at poverty levels (Asia Floor Wage Citation2020).
12. Rahman works with the Creative Conservation Alliance (CCA), a non-profit organization concerned with the ‘ecological and cultural preservation’ of Bangladesh’s remote hilltracts and north-eastern regions (Alliance Citation2021). The CCA’s previous work with Mro communities involved employing them as field conservationists, and training tribal hunters as ‘parabiologists’ to help research and monitor endangered animal populations (Aranya Citation2017).
13. Such arguments are supported by recent revelations about the poor working conditions of South Asian artisans working for international luxury brands (Schultz, Paton, and Jay Citation2020; see also Venkatesan Citation2009).
14. Recently, the brand has collaborated with international designers from the Bangladeshi diaspora wanting to connect with their heritage (Vij Citation2020).
15. The UN, for example, has highlighted the role of artisanal textile production in economic development, and the importance of intercultural dialogue in these processes (UNCTAD Citation2018; UNESCO Citation2009).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Rimi Khan
Dr Rimi Khan is a Lecturer in the School of Communication and Design at RMIT University Vietnam. Her research is broadly concerned with creativity, diverse citizenship and cultural economy. Her most recent work examines global youth cultures and ethical fashion economies. Her book, Art in Community: The Provisional Citizen (2016, Palgrave), examines the aesthetic, institutional and economic agendas that produce community.