During a 30-minute phone call, Hoda Katebi insists—more than once!—that she has “zero fashion experience.” And yet the Muslim author and founder of political fashion publication JooJoo Azad has found herself working at the deepest, most cellular level of the garment industry: producing the clothes. Today, she’s announcing the launch of the Blue Tin Production Co-Op in Chicago, billed as America’s first clothing cooperative run by refugee and immigrant women. (It’s cheekily named after the blue Danish cookie tin customarily used by immigrant women to store sewing supplies.)
Katebi never imagined she’d be diving into the minutiae of patternmaking, sample making, and production—in fact, as it is for many influential young women, this project was born from a desire to create her own line. “A lot of my work has been focused on garment workers’ rights and challenging fast fashion,” she explains. “I thought if I could start a clothing line and make it successful and be completely ethical, then it would be so much easier to hold brands accountable. So I started working on designs, had mentors, and was really excited, but when I started looking at production, it was difficult to find any I could actually trust. A lot of fashion production takes place in Los Angeles, but there are still sweatshops closing down there every few months—primarily with undocumented Mexican garment workers who get exploited [in the process]. I’m the daughter of immigrants, and knowing how difficult it is for immigrant and refugee women to find work, despite being so incredibly talented, is really wild. So I was just like, F it, I’ll do this myself!” she says with a laugh. “I wanted to put my own words to the test.”
So Katebi set up shop in Chicago (which is currently home to one of the largest Rohingya refugee populations) and hired three women, all of whom have experienced intense trauma—from domestic violence to losing family in the Aleppo bombings. Katebi is proud to offer them mental and physical health care through Blue Tin, but the work itself can be a form of therapy, too. “These women have been sewing or even running their own factories for decades,” Katebi says. “We’re not training women who don’t know how to sew to make charity objects, which is often what happens. We prioritize talent. The cooperative model has been so therapeutic in that way—it’s dignified, well-paid work for women who can learn to manage themselves. One of them always says that having people believe in you is transformative in and of itself.”
The co-op has already signed several designers as clients, plus one major department store (to be announced) that will produce an in-house line with it. Katebi says her overall goal is to offer designers in the U.S.—and abroad—a no-brainer alternative to sweatshops with “radical transparent production.” She’s launching the Blue Tin website today so designers can inquire, and she also started a crowdsourcing campaign to help cover funds for machines the co-op still needs.
Of course, getting consumers to care about how their clothes are made—and who is making them—is a whole other thing. Katebi is opening Blue Tin’s doors for studio visits, tour groups, and school trips so folks can get a firsthand glimpse of how much work goes into a single pattern. “I think [seeing that] can radically transform how people think,” she says. “We just had a group of high schoolers come in, and we talked about how a $5 T-shirt gets made—we broke down the raw materials, the price of cotton, the labor . . . . And by the end, when we said it was $5, their jaws dropped. There’s such a lack of understanding [on this topic], but even high schoolers could so easily see why a $5 T-shirt is wrong. Showing people the process is opening up this conversation about how much clothing should cost.”
Naturally, Katebi is a big believer in the buy-less-buy-better approach. “We should think about fashion as an art form, not something you buy just because it’s on sale,” she says. “To me, this is a very feminist project. Fashion has historically been dominated by women in terms of producers and consumers. That’s why it has been seen as silly or shallow, because women’s work isn’t valued in society. When you see a car designer or an architect, which we tend to think of as men’s jobs, we’re like, ‘He must be so brilliant!’ But that doesn’t happen with fashion design. There’s a huge gender difference there, and I think we need to slow down and really appreciate fashion as art.”
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