A university final project can be approached in a multitude of ways. Some students might set out to create something in its finality where others seize the opportunity to develop the foundations of something much larger that might take years to come to fruition. For CSM’s MA Material Futures graduate Harry Partridge, it’s the latter. This is just the beginning.
Partridge’s project, titled ‘If These Clothes Could Talk’, revolves around a machine that uses textile yarn as a new medium for recording and replaying audio. “The project was about humanising materials by utilising the voices of and stories of underrepresented fast fashion garment workers, reminding consumers that the materials they wear are far from anonymous,” says Partridge. While this project has vast scope and could perhaps be used for something more lighthearted – music, for instance; instead the twenty-something year old is eager to address the disconnect between fast fashion consumers and garment workers.
It’s a drizzly July afternoon and we sit outside Gail’s Bakery in London’s Kings Cross, just a five minute walk from where Partridge completed his MA. From his bag he takes out a spool of what looks to me like ordinary yarn that might be used in the construction of garments by any name – fast, slow, luxury. But, this is no ordinary yarn. No. Encoded on the spool of yarn in front of me are the voices of garment workers from Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Partridge’s project might not be hugely practical nor feasible in a commercial sense, it’s unlikely a future exists in which we will solely use audio-yarns but it’s conceptual, for sure. He hopes to fathom a future in which the voices of garment workers are incorporated into the very fibres of their craft – be that metaphorically if not mechanically, making a compelling statement about the importance of ethical and sustainable practices within fashion while showcasing the power of technology in promoting transparency and accountability.
“I’d be lying if I said I’d wanted to do a project around fashion or garments to begin with,” Partridge tells me. He describes fashion as far from his jurisdiction, machinery is his wheelhouse and functionality his forte, or lack thereof – such as the lack of function in the fashion industry, which he describes as “broken”, resulting in the root cause of our conversation today.
I hope I needn’t patronise you by going much further into the nitty gritty of fast fashion and its plethora of problems than just referring to the extent of exploitation – unto people and the planet – that takes place to make garments so cheaply. And, despite legislation, regulations and unionisation (which are on an exponential rise), the set up of the supply chain and sacrifice zones allow for a lack of transparency that further perpetuates the disconnect between a garment’s origins and its wearer. The crux of it is that exploitation remains rife.
Earlier this year, a series of videos shared on TikTok showed help messages embroidered into the labels of Shein garments. While Shein denied such allegations, this isn’t the first time that something like this has surfaced from fast fashion brands. In 2014, a similar story about Primark garments took the media by storm. Garment workers are speaking up. Yet their voices remain unheard. Partridge wants to know what underrepresented garment workers really have to say.
“As one of the biggest exporters of clothing with one of the largest producing communities and home to the Rana Plaza disaster, I reached out to trade unions in Bangladesh with help from Fashion Revolution,” he says. “I managed to find a representative from the Bangladeshi Garment Workers Trade Union on Facebook, actually, whom I told about the project and asked whether they might be able to put me in touch with individual workers to which they agreed.” Partridge then had a series of conversations via voice note with four Bangladeshi garment workers.
“I didn’t know what to expect. Perhaps they’d come back to me and say they’re having a great time, maybe it’d be the opposite. Either way, I wanted it to be a safe space for them to say whatever they had to say,” Partridge tells me. He notes feeling cognitive dissonance. “On one hand, I was happy that the project was progressing but on the other I was disturbed by what was said, on how they were underpaid and how they were living; how they couldn’t support their families or educate their children; were situated miles away from family just to go to work; how they felt silenced and that no one was listening to their demands.” Big brands of course don’t want this sort of thing broadcasted. “And, what’s scary is that these people are somewhat protected as part of a union. Thousands aren’t.”
Partridge transcribed (as such) these recordings onto conductive yarn. “The machine uses an old analogue recording technology that predates even the cassette,” he says. “It was like a Cold War spy gadget that can record sound on stainless steel wire. I’d started looking into sound technology in an older project and stumbled across this while down a rabbit hole.” The prospect of recording onto metal is wild. He agrees: “It fascinates me, and even more so now that it’s not really used anymore. The technology has been usurped.”
To recreate this piece of kit, Partridge collaborated with an engineer in Germany (and Google Translate thanks to the language barrier). “We managed to make a machine that recorded sound onto steel wire as it was originally intended.” He then theorised how he might replicate this technology for a metal-containing conductive yarn, often used in e-textiles. “After many iterations, I successfully modified the machine to work with this new material and due to the high content of stainless steel I was actually able to record onto the yarn.” Partridge exhibited the machine at the CSM graduate show in June. Yarn ran through the infrastructure and the accounts of garment workers from Bangladesh could be heard. It was nothing shy of impactful.
“I’m definitely going to continue developing it,” he says, as we brainstorm what’s next, “more installations, more testimonies and just trying to get them out there to close the disconnected gap between garment workers and consumers.”