Unraveled: The Life and Death of a Garment

In Unraveled, entrepreneur, researcher, and advocate Maxine Bédat follow the life of an American icon–a pair of jeans–to reveal what happens to give us our clothes. We visit a Texas cotton farm figuring out how to thrive without relying on fertilizers that poison the earth. Inside dyeing and weaving factories in China, where chemicals that are banned in the West slosh on factory floors and drain into waterways used to irrigate local family farms. Sewing floors in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are crammed with women working illegally low wages to produce garments as efficiently as machines. Back in America, our jeans get stowed, picked, and shipped out by Amazon warehouse workers pressed to be as quick as the robots primed to replace them. Finally, those jeans we had to have to get sent to landfills–or, if they’ve been “donated,” shipped back around the world to Africa, where they’re sold for pennies in secondhand markets or buried and buried in mountains of garbage.