In one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in New York City, The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory was located near Washington Park, occupating a couple of floors of the Asch Building. Regardless of its location, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory is considered a sweatshop by all standards as it consisted of long hours, low wages, and unsafe conditions for its workers. Most if not all of the workers who worked there were women, young or old it didn’t matter, and many of them didn’t speak English. I find this entire setup predatory on its own as it is clear these women were taken advantage of. The video we watched this week for the class was very insightful as well as heartbreaking. I had learned about the fire very briefly in my fashion design class in High School but had no idea how truly tragic and absolutely preventible the entire event was. On the evening of March 25th, 1911, just before the women were done with their workday, a fire broke out in a bin of cotton scraps. The first mistake was that the hose the manager tried to put the fire out with initially was rotten, and therefore wouldn’t work. The factory didn’t contain a sprinkler system, causing the fire to spread very quickly, with only one fire escape that wasn’t equipped to handle all of the women using it to try and escape, the fire escape had collapsed. The one elevator used to make rescue trips broke down after the fourth one, causing many of the workers to either jump to their death or perish in the flames. The entire ordeal lasted only eighteen minutes, and 146 workers died that evening. This whole event was heartbreaking to learn about. There really wasn’t much work for non-English speaking individuals at the time, and many who couldn’t find a better job, whether that be due to education or class, were forced to take these grueling jobs. It’s sickening to think how much money these companies made, how many long and tiresome hours their employees worked, yet they couldn’t have the decency to at least implement more safety precautions for them. Having only one fire exit is absolutely ludicrous, and the fact that there wasn’t a sprinkler system set up for a textile factory is disgusting to hear about. The owners were obviously cutting corners at the expense of these women’s safety.
As previously stated, I learned about the Triangle Shirtwaist fire a few years ago in one of my fashion courses. I really respected my teacher for bringing up the horrible repercussions that the textile industry has on our planet. We watched the documentary, “The True Cost” which detailed the horrible way our country disposes of its citizens’ textiles. This includes shipping the textiles to a third world country to have them and their citizens deal with it, ultimately suffering the consequences from it, such as inhaling toxic fumes, polluting their oceans, etc. The documentary also talks about fast fashion and the “true cost” of these subjectively less expensive clothing items that we buy. It exposes just how many of the even “more expensive” brands that we buy still fall under fast fashion as the textiles and materials that they use are cheap and nonbiodegradable. The entire made me hyper-aware of my carbon footprint in the world, I now try to buy anything that I can secondhand, mostly my clothing and books, as well as trying to limit buying fast fashion indulgences and trying not to get swooned by the ever-changing trend cycles.