Skip to content Skip to footer

Outta Sight, Outta Mind: What Producers Don’t Want You to Know About How Your Clothes Are Made

Part of the Series

Ladydrawers - Outta Sight, Outta MindThis installment of “Our Fashion Year,” our year-long look at international gender, labor, and cultural production (click here for “Fast Fashion,” “Let’s Go Shopping” and “The Business of Thrift” with Julia Gfrörer, and Mendes’ previous strips, “Zoned” and “Red Tape“) – Melissa Mendes’ last on this series – brings us inside the places that make our clothes. The often complicated interplay between national governments and the garment industry isn’t pretty, by any means (as Anne Elizabeth Moore reported from Cambodia in January), which is why apparel manufacturers and garment-exporting countries alike often prefer that the factories are kept out of sight and out of mind.

As always, an archive of our previous strips is located here. In next month’s strip, by Anne Elizabeth Moore and Ellen Lindner, we’ll talk directly to the workers in garment factories around the world.

Ladydrawers - Outta Sight, Outta Mind

Our most important fundraising appeal of the year

December is the most critical time of year for Truthout, because our nonprofit news is funded almost entirely by individual donations from readers like you. So before you navigate away, we ask that you take just a second to support Truthout with a tax-deductible donation.

This year is a little different. We are up against a far-reaching, wide-scale attack on press freedom coming from the Trump administration. 2025 was a year of frightening censorship, news industry corporate consolidation, and worsening financial conditions for progressive nonprofits across the board.

We can only resist Trump’s agenda by cultivating a strong base of support. The right-wing mediasphere is funded comfortably by billionaire owners and venture capitalist philanthropists. At Truthout, we have you.

We’ve set an ambitious target for our year-end campaign — a goal of $250,000 to keep up our fight against authoritarianism in 2026. Please take a meaningful action in this fight: make a one-time or monthly donation to Truthout before December 31. If you have the means, please dig deep.