A 22-Year-Old Wants to Turn Garment Workers into Fashion Designers. Is That a Good Idea? | 100 People With Ideas

Less a business plan than an idea expressed as art. How long it can last, and what it costs, are the questions that matter.

A few young people in blue French work jackets stood on a stage, eyes blank, movements stiff, miming labor on an assembly line and making a rhythmic clicking sound with their mouths. Someone in the audience stood up and patted one of them on the shoulder. Their movements loosened, smiles broke out, and they began to talk, shake hands, embrace.

The performance more or less compressed the vision its director holds for what "fashion design" could be: letting traditional laborers become fashion designers too. The director is Kim Hou, a 22-year-old French woman. She has been working on this for two years and has founded a fashion label called About a Worker.

The vision is as appealing as it is rebellious. Kim is a fourth-year student at the Academie voor Industriële Vormgeving Eindhoven (AIVE) in the Netherlands. The school is known for being open-minded and for its "real humanism," and even so, most of her teachers thought the idea impractical.

Her one supporter was her class tutor, who let Kim stretch a six-month course across a full year, freeing her to hunt for factories in different cities, contact retailers, attend exhibitions and promote the brand. The tutor also talked with her on Skype every week, advising her to put the production and design of the garments front and center on the brand's website, and to be careful about how she presented the workers — to avoid condescending phrases like "educate them," for instance.

Kim eventually found four garment workers at a factory in Saint-Denis, on the outskirts of Paris. Together they decided that About a Worker would not follow the industry's spring/summer and fall/winter calendar. Collections would be organized by city instead, built on the traditional dress of local workers, with all fabric sourced in the country where the project took place.

About a Worker is an anti-commercial brand. How many workers can meet Kim's requirements? How productive are they? How do you keep design quality steady? Even granting that the brand's concept is a ready-made story, how many potential buyers are there?

By the most conservative reading, this is less a business plan than an idea expressed as art — one that happens to produce actual clothes.

1

Kim cares about people at the bottom. She can talk fluently about the currently fashionable push for "ethical brands," which probably has a lot to do with the people About a Worker works with.

She says it was only after the 2013 factory collapse in Dhaka, Bangladesh, that she learned H&M and Giorgio Armani in fact make their goods in the same factories. What she took from it: "Workers today aren't what they used to be. They know how to work well and fast, and they have plenty of imagination. The problem is how they're treated — the hours and the conditions have a lot in them that isn't reasonable. People don't realize how many problems sit behind the things they buy."

That account doesn't quite cover the state of labor across the global garment industry, but it does stand for the story Kim wants to tell.

She will also bring up a black, green and white Proenza Schouler bucket bag, a gift from her last internship. She didn't like the job, but it gave her a more direct sense of the industry's daily reality: "In New York I learned how to put out four collections in six months, on top of all the collaboration lines with shopping malls and so on. It was completely insane. And so much waste — sometimes we'd make ten samples of one piece, pick one, and the rest would just sit there or get thrown out."

Then there was her shopping-crazed phase. In middle school she attended a school full of rich students. The girls liked wearing Chanel, and buying fashion was close to a requirement for fitting in. "They'd ask me, Kim, why don't you have a pair of Diesel jeans? I remember at one point I was following 14 fashion bloggers at once."

Finally there is a question that sounds worth sitting with: why do people get so attached to certain brands? Once she started working in fashion, the gap between the industry's public image and the way it actually runs came as a shock — some luxury brands love to talk about French craftsmanship, but their factories may be in Spain, and some of their shoes are made in Romania.

Kim comes from a comfortable background. Her father is Hou Hanru, the well-known curator and artistic director of MAXXI in Rome. Her mother, Evelyne Jouanno, founded the Ars Citizen foundation. Both are supportive and both offer advice often. The most important piece of it, Kim thinks, is that a project should never drift from its original design: the people who go unheard should be heard, and the people who go unseen should be seen.

Which is, of course, exactly what About a Worker is trying to say.

2

After her New York internship ended, Kim called her friend Paul Boulenger, who was then working at a factory in Morocco. Paul had founded a T-shirt brand and understood factories and sales channels far better than she did. To improve the odds, he suggested she start with a small factory, and he joined the project himself as the brand's business partner. "He knew a factory near Paris well. We went to meet them once and decided to work together."

The factory was Mode Estime, in Saint-Denis on the edge of Paris. It is a small welfare workshop with barely more than a dozen workers, and it hires only people from the very bottom of Paris society, people who struggle to feed and clothe themselves. It signs them to contracts of one to three years, pays a basic wage and provides training. Most of the workers are immigrants who could not find steady work before and had only been able to pick up odd jobs.

Kim was lucky. She found four people with some grounding in garment-making — the four designers behind About a Worker's first collection.

Fadila Boubekeur comes from Constantine, a city in northeastern Algeria. She has loved making clothes since she was small — pincushions, bodices, hand embroidery, anything — an influence from her mother, who owned a sewing machine and specialized in expensive traditional Algerian garments. Fadila likes to repeat a story from when she was nine, the first time she made something herself: a hairband woven out of thorns.

Fadila is 60 now. Her children were born in Paris and grew up in Algeria, but she still wanted to go back and live in Paris. She spent five years there working toward that, volunteering with various associations, until she got into Mode Estime. "I found a job, and in the field I love. I'm really happy about that." The past year and a half at Mode Estime has run to a steady rhythm: work from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., ironing, sewing, overlocking, cutting, with an hour off at midday. There is a small wood outside the factory, and the view is lovely. T-shirts are the simplest thing to make, 15 to 30 minutes each. Trousers are harder, but trousers are Fadila's favorite thing to make. Describing her work, she used the phrase "real joy" three times. She is now planning to set up a small studio with colleagues inside the factory and design clothes of their own. "Fashion isn't moral, and it isn't immortal — but making it gives us moral." She was playing, a little mischievously, on the French le moral: morale, spirit.

Aissatou Gakou, 33, is Senegalese. She came to France at 18 and has three children. She likes long dresses, brightly colored headscarves and big earrings. Her favorite thing to do every day is cook, and back in Senegal she once enrolled in a three-year sewing course — hand sewing in the first year, machine sewing in the last two. The training center closed after only a year.

In 2014, after arriving in France, Aissatou heard that Mode Estime ran a garment-making training program and applied. To get more practice she bought a sewing machine for home as well. She doesn't like making T-shirts and hates fiddly work like overlocking and setting collars, but she likes making patterns, because it demands complete concentration.

Kira Ghoul, from Tunisia, always looks serious. She is 42 and has a nine-year-old son. Both are from Zarzis, a city near Djerba that the French love for holidays. She started learning garment-making at 14, but not by choice: it was a course her middle school offered called "copy couture," how to copy a garment. She didn't like it, but Kira is disciplined, ambitious and full of energy. She won a place through a competition in a second course, "industrial couture," how to run a production line. After earning her diploma in 1996 she worked in garment factories for three years straight. Conditions were harsh: everything moved with the line, you couldn't turn your head while working, 45 hours a week from Monday to Saturday, with overnight overtime common around holidays.

The experience had its upside. Having done contract work for Pierre Cardin and many other labels, Kira arrived in France knowing just about every brand there is.

Misbahou Yisouf is the only man at Mode Estime, and he doesn't turn 32 until the end of this year. He was born in the Comoro Islands. Family circumstances forced him out of school in fifth grade and into stonemasonry, where he earned a certificate as a stonemasonry foreman; in 2006 he spent two years at a military medical service center. On March 28, 2008, war broke out in the Comoro Islands. Misbahou was shot three times, lost a leg, and fled to Mayotte for refuge.

To get away from the fighting he brought his wife and two children to France in 2010. They actually have three children, but the eldest son stayed behind in the Comoros. "Life is complicated," Misbahou says — whenever he has to recount something painful or long and would rather not go into it, he tends to wave it away with the word "complicated" — "but it's easier now. I'm lucky." In 2014 an advisor found him an internship as a cashier at Carrefour. After one day on the job the same advisor called to say Mode Estime had an opening for a sewing machinist. "I said, no, no, I don't know how to sew, even though both my parents did that work." He tried it anyway, because he needed the money; the family was living in a hotel at the time and wanted somewhere else to go. "Unfortunately," he joked, "Alice took me in."

He knew going in that he would be the only man among a lot of women, but "now it feels like I'm working with a bunch of guys." Misbahou originally thought making clothes was a fairly stupid thing to do. After three months picking up skills in two areas he began to take it seriously, applied for a full-time position and passed an exam for a garment-industry diploma. "That way life can keep moving forward."

3

A collection takes six months from start to finish, and Kim Hou spends almost all of it at the factory, running training sessions for the workers with teachers she invites in, based on the traditional fashion design process.

It starts with a moodboard: finding inspiration in your own life and your own thoughts about the industry, not on image sites like Pinterest. Kim gave everyone a camera and told them to photograph anything interesting inside and outside the factory. Fadila liked shooting streets and people, especially the depth of a street running toward the horizon, and crowds. Kira was drawn to anything arranged in neat rows: red brick on building façades, tidy fencing around flower beds, the parallel vertical bars of a vent. Aissatou's photos were all plants and trees, or botanical prints on cloth. Misbahou's showed the curiosity of a newcomer to the trade: fabric of every kind — in the factory, in the market, satin, cotton.

Kim then had them turn the photos into drawings, patterns that could be printed on a garment. "I stressed that the drawing didn't have to become a work of art. What mattered was getting the message across. It could become a platform for exchange and discussion." So Fadila's streets turned into pleats and her crowds into radiating circular prints; Kira used squares, dots and two lines to draw a set of "meta-patterns" that could extend forever; Aissatou drew flowing leaves; Misbahou drew flowers and guns together.

Gathering inspiration and drawing patterns took five months. The last step was to take a garment apart and put it back together. The garment Kim gave the workers to rework was the "Bleu de travail," the blue work uniform that appeared among French laborers in the 19th century. After the Industrial Revolution, railways, coal mines and other workplaces needed far more hands, and laborers needed clothes that were tough and didn't show dirt. "Bleu de travail" was usually dyed indigo with the natural plant dye indigo — cheap, and grease didn't show on it. The design was plainer than American workwear: no zippers, no pleats, no fussy detail, a loose, straight-cut shape, usually just five buttons, double-stitched seams for strength and several pockets for carrying things.

The man who brought the French blue work jacket back into view in recent years is Bill Cunningham, the street-style photographer at The New York Times. Across decades of shooting the street, the jacket he wore was almost always a "Bleu de travail" he had bought cheap at a Paris flea stall when he was young — close to a personal trademark.

What the workers did with the blue jacket left Kim "in disbelief." Fadila used pleats to turn it into an asymmetrical dress; Kira's silver print gave a plain jacket a futuristic look; Kira turned leaves into ruffles and stitched them onto the jacket with ribbons, giving it a sculptural quality close to Comme des Garçons; Misbahou's flowers and guns repeat across the front placket, cuffs and trouser hems, recalling the big all-over logo prints of streetwear labels.

For production, Kim and Paul raised nearly 12,000 euros on Kickstarter. Each of the four designers had two pieces formally produced, priced at roughly 200 to 400 euros, and sold now through the brand's site and a few boutiques in Europe. That is not a small sum even for European shoppers, and Kim later heard back that the prices were too high.

"If a French person is going to spend 300 euros on clothing, they'll try to spend it on something refined — cashmere, or a brand-name handbag, especially a classic house. The French are attached to the classic brands, and that makes life hard for young designer labels, which often have to price under 200 euros."

Beyond the low output, she says, the pricing was a deliberate choice, meant to put the workers on the same footing as mainstream designers. "Alexander Wang's designs are produced in China. Why can he charge those prices? Why can't workers who become designers and start their own brand do the same?" The thinking: a high price aims the brand at the industry's elite. If elites buy clothes designed by workers, the workers' voices are being heard directly.

Still, with an eye on commercial sustainability, About a Worker began adding simpler products last year — jackets, T-shirts, hoodies — all kept under 100 euros, plus merchandise at 10 to 40 euros: tote bags, keychains and clutches printed with lines like "Liberty, Equality, Creativity" and "Work in Progress."

A more practical reason may be that there aren't many workers who can design workwear, and a tote bag is much simpler.

4

In April this year, About a Worker began its second collection: Venice.

The Venice collection started by chance. Kim and Paul were first invited by Venice Design to show their first collection in the city during the Venice Biennale. Talking with a curator there, they heard about a nonprofit called "Il Cerchio."

Since 1997 the organization has run a garment-making training program called "The Sartoria" for the women's prison on Venice's Giudecca island, the Casa della Reclusione Donne della Giudecca, and it has helped the women there start their own ready-to-wear label, "Banco Lotto n*10." The label opened a standalone store in 2003 in Castello, one of the busiest parts of Venice, and it is still running.

The two found Giulia Pannoli, who runs "Banco Lotto n*10," on Facebook, and through her made contact with the prison. Rubelli, a Venice textile house that supplies fine fabric to luxury brands, also offered support, agreeing to hand over surplus fabric for the training and for making the new collection.

After weeks of waiting on approvals, the two finally walked into the women's prison for the first time on a morning in late April. Everything was far more involved than the first collaboration: through security, ID handed to a guard, every electronic device into a locker, the camera handed to a second guard, then security again and a signature in the register before entering the inner prison. At the end of a long corridor they found the "Sartoria" they were looking for.

The four women on the project — Anna, Cin, Maya and Mihaela — were chosen by the prison. They work five days a week, four hours a day, making garments for local designers and for the prison's own label, "Banco Lotto n*10."

Only once she was inside and had met them did Kim grasp how unusual the situation was. About a Worker was founded on transparency: as with the first collection, the workers tell their own past, present and future, conveyed both through the finished clothes and through the pile of photos, sketches and conversations accumulated along the way. But the prison would not let Kim bring a photographer, and allowed only two or three hours of shooting per visit. The first collection produced more than 6,000 photos and videos; the Venice project produced just over 300.

The prison also would not let Kim ask much about the women's histories. After meeting them, Kim gave up trying on her own too. As best she could tell, most of them had made small mistakes and ended up in prison because they couldn't afford a lawyer; some were there only over immigration problems. Most had bleak backgrounds, and many were not there because of anything they had done wrong. "Some of them will be in there for 25 years. We brought them fashion magazines to look at, and some artists' books. What they need is so much more than prison life."

Kim didn't want the collaboration to become a kind of "self-harm" through dredging up the past. This collection, she decided, should emphasize who the women are apart from being "inmates," and should show that people treated with contempt can find their confidence again through making things. "We'd never been to a prison. Everything we imagined came from the brutal scenes in American TV shows. But once you're inside, you find the worst part is being watched 24 hours a day, being treated like a child. And these are people from 20 to 50 years old. They're all adults."

The basis for this collection was a traditional laborer's outfit from Sacca Fisola, an artificial island next to the main island of Venice. The island has 1,530 residents, mostly people pushed out to the edge by gentrification and tourism in the center. The traditional outfit is a shirt and long skirt with an apron.

Kim had the women start with masks — not only because this was Venice, but because a mask means both hiding yourself and showing yourself. A mask could be the women's avatar, a place to put wild imaginings, a way to show either the good side or the bad. Reproducing it on the final garment might also be read as using design to restore the true self.

The women were again given cameras, for five structures and five textures common in the world around them. But since they couldn't take the cameras outside to shoot, this moodboard leaned more on memory and drawing: the nine colors that best define their surroundings, themselves and their past; 20 minutes to draw the animal they felt stood for their soul; three emotions they feel every day; memories worth keeping. Then lines to assemble all of it into the rough shape of a mask, and ink to fill the mask in. Finally they sewed the masks out of fabric in different colors and textures. Of the three pieces shown on the brand's site, one looks like a pointed cap pulling a face, one like a bearded child's face, one is a heart pieced together in gold and pale blue.

After the masks, Kim had the women use them as the basis for larger pieces of cloth. Before starting they had to ask themselves questions: what do you need most to stay happy in prison; how do the people around you dress, and how would you define your own style; what do you think about most while you sew; what are you best at. Then they picked the three colors that best represented their past, present and future.

Of the four, the one who surprised Kim most was Cin, a Chinese woman. Cin had once worked in Prato, the Italian city thick with garment factories. At first she seemed entirely unable to follow Kim's process of self-questioning, sketching and choosing cloth, and in the end she made the "wildest" dress of the lot. From the photos Kim sent, it really is a dress full of imagination: white, pale purple and vermilion together, looking like a slip dress worn over a shirt as one piece; four flap pockets across the chest emphasizing the bustline; every pleat of the skirt picked out with vermilion topstitching; a few stiff white ribbons added at the neck as decoration.

"She kept saying 'non capito, non capito' — I don't understand. Later it became 'capito capito.'"

5

All of this is the "brand story," and Kim Hou has to present it over and over at exhibitions and talks around the world.

In a prominent place on the brand's site she has put a downloadable "Manifesto": We have learned to applaud manufactured stories. These stories sit in glittering gold frames, dressed up with famous fashion designers and trend-setting celebrities, but they are built by garment workers who are never named.

Kim Hou both designed this idea and presents it.

Her schedule bears little resemblance to a fourth-year student's day. In her own words, "my project has more or less become my life": up at 6 a.m., a little time to meditate, then to the factory for meetings, meetings with journalists, work until evening. Her own spending has grown more restrained too — she buys new clothes once every three months.

She spent the whole of this summer at the Paris factory. For the past three or four months she has been hauling a suitcase around, meeting different people every week, mostly to put About a Worker's output and concept in front of a wider audience through exhibitions, installations and panel talks.

During Paris Fashion Week in late September she opened a pop-up store with a Japanese select shop. In the 10-square-meter gallery space she reproduced the factory environment exactly and walked visitors through the project's design process, had Kira talk with the well-dressed crowd, and brought in students from Central Saint Martins and from a Paris nonprofit fashion school to discuss the future of fashion education. She wanted the pop-up to be more than a place to sell clothes — a place to talk about new ways of producing and creating.

The collaboration with Mode Estime continues. "You can't use them for one collection and then end the relationship." Because the factory is a welfare operation, a worker's contract there can run three years at most. Kim is working with the factory on a longer-term program that would let workers move to better jobs once they have built up enough experience.

Of the four workers on the first collection, Misbahou, the only man, has been promoted to foreman, a step closer to his dream of getting into fashion. Fadila plans to retire in a year. Aissatou has left for family reasons and is now raising her three children full-time. Kira is seriously ill — she had already been diagnosed with cancer when she joined the project — but for her, "work matters more than anything."

Kim's next plan is to find a factory in China or Bangladesh. "Our goal is to keep putting out new collections, and maybe even help the workers open stores. Getting people to understand the workers is the first step; getting people into the discussion is the second. I don't have a solution. I'm just raising the question. About a Worker exists so that people from different backgrounds get a chance to meet, and to talk about whether the whole fashion system can get better."

So how far can About a Worker actually change labor conditions in the garment trade? How many "elites buying clothes designed by workers," how much of "the workers' voices being heard directly," can it really deliver?

Chasing that answer may be exactly what running this brand consists of.

If Kim wants the label to last, she probably can't dodge the most basic questions of commercialization: profit requires scale, or higher margins, and scale means the idea gets diluted. But if it isn't run for profit, the business ends up working like charitable art — and how long can that kind of sustainability last?

Two things may be the most practical answer. One: in the contract About a Worker signs with the factory's management, 10 percent of every sale goes back to all the workers, not only the one who designed the piece. The other: Kim is simply someone asking a question. She doesn't need it to make a living.

Cover image and photographs from the About a Worker website