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It was an April morning in Bangladesh when inspectors entered an eight-storey building and found cracks.
这是孟加拉国4月的一个早晨，检查人员进入了一座八层楼高的建筑，发现了裂缝。
Cracks in columns, cracks in walls, cracks in the floor.
柱子上有裂缝，墙壁上有裂缝，地板上也有裂缝。
For years, this building housed a number of shops, banks, and, on the upper floors, garment factories.
多年来，这座大楼里一直有着许多商店、银行，在楼上还有服装厂。
But the day the inspectors discovered this building was falling apart at the seams, they actually did their jobs and sent everyone home.
但在检查人员发现这座建筑的接缝处快要坍塌的那一天，他们确实尽职尽责，让所有人都回家了。
Avoiding a potential disaster?
他们避免了一场潜在的灾难？
Or, so it seemed that day?
还是只是那天看似如此？
Unfortunately, this story doesn’t end in smiles and relief because this is the story of how the fashion industry has left deep scars on the world and continues to push environmental destruction and worker exploitation down our throats.
不幸的是，这个故事的结尾并非人们绽放微笑，感到宽慰，因为这是一个关于时尚业如何给世界留下深刻伤痕，并继续强迫我们接受环境破坏和工人剥削的故事。
This is the story of fashion.
这就是时尚的故事。
Why a poorly built building in Bangladesh reveals the horrors of the fashion industry?
为什么说孟加拉国一座简陋的建筑揭示了时尚业的恐怖?
What Karl Marx has to do with Shein, and how this might offer a possible path away from our current clothing industry?
卡尔·马克思与希音有什么关系，这又如何为我们提供一条或许能够摆脱当前服装业的路？
The fashion industry that we know today didn’t just spring up out of nowhere.
我们今天所知的时尚业并不是凭空冒出来的。
If we travel back in time from Instagram shopping, to malls, through catalogs, to storefronts, and all the way to the textile mills of England in the 18th and 19th century we can begin to understand that fashion is intimately intertwined with the emergence of fossil fuels, the birth of the industrial revolution and the spread of capitalism.
如果我们时光倒流，从Instagram购物，追溯到购物中心，从通过看目录样品购物，追溯到去门店购物，一直到18世纪和19世纪英国的纺织厂，我们就可以开始理解，时尚与化石燃料的出现、工业革命的诞生以及资本主义的传播密切相关。
Before the invention of the mechanized textile mill, clothing was produced on a much smaller and deliberate scale.
在机械化纺织厂发明之前，服装生产规模要小得多，做工也更仔细。
Often, you knew the person who made your clothes or you made them yourself.
人们往往认识给自己做衣服的人，或者干脆自己做衣服。
But with the water-driven, and then later, coal driven textile mill, it became a lot easier to create immense amounts of clothes and cotton goods at scale.
但有了水驱动的纺织厂，以及后来的煤炭驱动的纺织厂，大规模生产服装和棉织品变得容易多了。
However, the invention of these technologies didn’t immediately lead to a boom in clothing production.
然而，这些技术的发明并没有立即让服装生产繁荣起来。
That was facilitated by capitalists.
这是资本家促成的。
The textile mills of the late 1700s and 1800s were perfect examples of capitalist exploitation.
18世纪末和19世纪的纺织厂是最典型的资本主义剥削。
Over the course of those two centuries, former peasants of the English countryside were forced off their land by a number of decrees and policies, and had nowhere to go except into the mills and cities.
在这两个世纪的过程中，英国农村从前的农民被一系列法令和政策赶出了他们的土地，除了工厂和城市之外，他们无处可去。
Landless and without work, these peasants looked toward the smokestacks of the textile factories for wages to survive, but this glut of workers meant factory owners could hand out meager wages and exploit their workers to high hell.
他们没有土地，没有工作，只能指望靠纺织厂的大烟囱来获得工资，维持生计，但工人过剩意味着工厂老板可以发放微薄的工资，将工人剥削到死。
Indeed, the conditions of Fredrich Engels’ father’s textile mills in the 19th century England were part of what drove him together with Marx to draft the Communist Manifesto.
事实上，19世纪英国弗里德里希·恩格斯父亲的纺织厂的情况，是驱使他和马克思共同起草《共产党宣言》的部分原因。
It also spurred him into writing a book on the conditions of the working class in textile mills.
这也促使他写了一本关于纺织厂工人阶级状况的书。
In that book, Engels writes about one lace-making factory that employs “a mass of young girls – there are said to be 15,000 of them in all – who sleep and eat on the premises,” going on to add that “working-hours, even in the best establishments, are fifteen, and, in very pressing cases, eighteen a day.”
在那本书中，恩格斯写到一家花边制作厂雇了“一大群年轻女孩--据说总共有15000人--她们都在工厂里睡觉和吃饭”，接着补充道，“即使在最好的工厂，每天的工作时间也是15小时，在非常紧迫的情况下，会多达18小时。”
The emerging fashion industry squeezed workers under gruesome conditions to continuously produce.
新兴的时尚业迫使工人们在恶劣的条件下继续生产。
Young English girls and women sucked in toxic fumes, lost fingers in machinery, and worked 100-hour weeks.
年轻的英国女孩和妇女会因此吸入有毒的烟雾，被机器切掉手指，每周工作100个小时。
While, across the Atlantic, enslaved Black folks toiled for cotton plantation capitalist who fed the explosion of the English textile mills.
而在大西洋彼岸，被奴役的黑人为棉花种植园的资本家辛勤劳作，这些资本家助长了英国纺织厂的激增。
This exploitation of factory workers and of enslaved people combined with new automatic loom technologies meant massive profits for factory and farm owners.
这种对工厂工人和奴隶的剥削，加上新的自动织布机技术，为工厂和农场主带来了巨额利润。
Because, the lower these capitalists were able to drive wages, the more waste they could dump, and the more they could produce, the higher their profits.
因为，这些资本家让工资越低，他们可以倾倒的垃圾就越多，他们能生产的越多，他们的利润就越高。
But this production had to go somewhere.
但这样生产出来的产品总得有个去处。
It had to be sold and worn to actually make a profit for the factory owners.
它必须被卖出去，让人们穿上，才能真正为工厂老板盈利。
Thus clothing became fashion.
就这样，服装成为了时尚。
A piece of cloth became so much more than just something to keep the sun off your back, it was a commodity that could display wealth, status, politics and more.
一块布不再仅仅是用来遮挡阳光的东西，还是一种可以展示财富、地位、政治信仰等的商品。
Fashion, with its endless churning of seasons and trends, is a perfect example of how our economic system transforms something that was made for mere pennies into something that can be sold for riches.
随着季节和潮流的不断变化，时尚完美展示了我们的经济体系是如何将只为几分钱制作的东西，转变为了可以出售致富的东西。
And let’s be clear, those riches never reach the pocket of the workers actually making the clothes.
要明确一点，这些财富永远不会进入真正生产服装的工人的口袋。
