Rethink Your Clothes

“Rethink your Clothes” is a short docu-fiction about two women who are seeking alternatives to fast fashion, a phenomenon that is keeping workers in the garment industry below the poverty line and affects buyers by tempting them into over-consumption. From Bangladesh to Luxembourg, Salma and Christine turn their thoughts into concrete actions and adopt small gestures as solutions against the fast fashion production. The fight within the garment industry is seen from another perspective than the usual victimization and/or blaming of those involved. Both women are ingenious, have agency and become real change-makers. They get indirectly connected through a secret t-shirt tag and we follow them in their parallel and complementary quest through the film, until they discover impactful and positive solutions to ameliorate their lives. In an act of rebellion against the working conditions in a clothes factory in Bangladesh, Salma decides to produce a tag which denounces the bad conditions she suffers from at work. She stitches the tag into a batch of t-shirts - the tag never getting noticed by the manufacturer. Later on, Christine, a fast fashion consumer, finds the tag on her t-shirt in Luxembourg. The mysterious message motivates Christine to start questioning her own consumption when uncovering the meaning behind the tag. Meanwhile, Salma is on her own quest, discovering how to ameliorate working conditions within the garment industry. Their interconnected story ends with a change in attitudes: Christine realizes that she has been drawn into a cycle of over-consumption and launches an awareness-raising action to motivate people to buy less clothes and keep them longer. Salma starts to unionize with the objective to achieve higher wages for workers in the garment industry. Their parallel quest highlights that changing consumer habits in Luxembourg has a direct impact on people across the world, and is closely linked to the viability of a more equitable garment production system in Bangladesh. We want to go beyond a bleak denunciation of bad working conditions and show the alternatives that exist. “Rethink your clothes” inspires us to find out how we can, together, participate in changing the face of the garment industry by taking little steps.