The Architecture of Looking Away: Why Our Brains Protect the Fashion Industry

I thought I understood the industry, its culture, its quality and lack thereof. I knew the ateliers in Italy where people discussed the quality of an espresso while standing next to an ironing machine that shaped a Prada blazer in twelve minutes. I knew the production facilities in Belgium, where the quality of the product and the people who made it could be mentioned in the same breath. I knew the working conditions in producing high-end designer fashion in Europe.

Peter Leferink is a fashion critic, essayist and cultural strategist with 30 years of experience in the fashion industry on all sides of the table. He publishes essays about fashion as a cultural and political phenomenon, including in NRC and de Volkskrant. His work moves at the intersection of craftsmanship, systems and social responsibility.

The three factories

Years later I saw ‘Blood, Sweat and T-shirts’. The series follows six young people with a passion for clothing as they learn about clothing production in India. What made the series so jarring was its structure. The viewers go through exactly the same process as the participants: from openness to discomfort to horror. Because of this series, everything I thought I knew collapsed like a house of cards. After years as a fashion professional, on all sides of the table, in factories, studios and classrooms, I was blown away by the discovery of a world beyond the world I knew.

The first factory looks more or less as you would expect: organized, maybe a little messier, functional, but certainly not what you fear from a sweatshop. And that’s exactly where the trap lies. This first factory immediately activates confirmation bias: the brain recognizes what it already knows, draws parallels to places it trusts, and concludes: See, it’s not so bad.

Then comes the second factory. Less light, longer days, younger faces. This is where the discomfort begins and a seductive thought creeps in: But these people have jobs, they support their families, who are you to judge? This idea feels like cultural sensitivity. That’s exactly why he’s so dangerous. It’s an emergency exit that traps you exactly where you already were.

But only then do we come to the third place, the third factory. This place exists because the first factory can’t handle the demand for cheap ready-to-wear items. In addition, the second believes that production costs are still too high for our insatiable hunger for more, cheaper and even cheaper. The third factory is a place you would never normally see. This is where the question becomes untenable: not whether one is allowed to have an opinion about it, but rather how it is possible that one did not know it for so long. I remember the image of a teenager – or even younger – sleeping next to a machine, surrounded by dust and dirt.

Confirmation bias is not a personal failing. It is a cognitive mechanism that the system knows and uses. It’s no coincidence that the first factory is reassuring. She is the face that the industry presents because she knows exactly how the brain works. This picture begins to crumble in the second factory.

The catastrophe that changed nothing

Rana Plaza. On April 24, 2013, a factory building collapsed in Savar, Bangladesh. More than 1,100 people were killed. Cracks had been discovered the day before. Engineers advised evacuation. The workers were sent in anyway; Anyone who didn’t work lost their daily wages. This was followed by outraged statements, sustainability reports and compensation funds. And then? The industry just kept growing. A 2022 study shows that French imports from Bangladesh actually increased after the disaster.

Psychologist Paul Slovic called this the ‘Collapse of Compassion’ in 2007: Human empathy never scales with the number of victims. 1,100 deaths is a statistic. A single face moves us. More paralyzes us. This is not a moral failure. This is how the brain works. And it is precisely because of this feature that we quickly forgot about Rana Plaza.

There is a place in northern Chile where more than 60,000 tons of western clothing ends up every year. Polyester, nylon, all fibers that remain in the ground for up to 200 years. This mountain is invisible to the consumers who clicked ‘order’ four times today. Singaporean fast fashion company Shein produces between 2,000 and 10,000 new items of clothing every day. This is done using an algorithm that monitors social media and determines what is made in real time.

The Swedish fashion group H&M launched the ‘Conscious Collection’ in 2019. In 2022, the Dutch nonprofit Changing Markets Foundation concluded that more than 60 percent of H&M’s sustainability claims were unfounded or demonstrably false. The ‘Conscious Collection’ still exists.

Here the class question plays its underestimated role. People with higher incomes create an average of 76 percent more clothing waste than people with lower incomes, according to a 2022 Boston University study. Nevertheless, the question of guilt in the sustainability debate is systematically shifted to those who are least able to make changes. The woman shopping at Irish fast fashion retailer Primark has no choice. The woman who buys from a sustainable brand has a choice and still buys more.

In 1997, philosopher Charles Mills described this as structured ignorance: not the lack of information, but the production of ‘not-knowing’ as an institutional system. In the fashion industry, this invisibility is architectural. Production is geographically distant. The supply chain is opaque on purpose, not by accident. Greenwashing simulates transparency while maintaining structural invisibility.

This system has an ally in our minds. John Jost, a professor at New York University, describes in his 2004 ‘System Justification Theory’ how people tend to defend the system in which they live. This happens not in spite of, but partly because of, its disadvantages. Justifying the system creates cognitive calm. Questioning it takes energy, creates feelings of guilt, and requires you to come to terms with your own position in it. The brain chooses rest wherever it can.

Resistance begins with refusing to not know something even though you could know it. With a refusal to confuse moral hesitation with sensitivity. With the refusal to accept structured ignorance as an excuse.

“Ignorance is bliss,” said the English poet Thomas Gray in 1742. He was right. It’s wonderful until it’s not.