Sharp Threads is a fashion centred project that explores the theme of empathy, focusing on the role of fast fashion in the exploitation of sweatshop workers in developing countries. Our aim is to encourage the people who come across the project to break the indifference towards this practice, making them question the story behind their clothes and the places where they were manufactured.

If you’re curious enough to take a look, it’s fairly easy to read the tag on your t-shirt and find that it was made in Bangladesh, Cambodia or Indonesia, but what do we really know about these countries? As someone who was born and raised in Italy, when I started to get interested in fast fashion I soon realised how little I knew about the main places exploited by this industry, often ignored by a European-centred public education.

I believe that this is the main reason why most people aren’t aware or interested in this issue: when you don’t know anything about a certain social, political, or geographical context, it’s impossible to feel any empathy towards the people involved in it. You can’t genuinely care about something you don’t know.

It’s an easy, involuntary process that brings the average Western citizen to mentally classify developing countries as one big category, and think of them as the Generic Poor Country, an indistinguishable mush of cultures illustrated by the pitiful images offered by the media, rather than as individual places with their own history, culture, language, traditions.

Being unable to visualise a certain country as a tangible, individual place with its living and breathing population, it becomes hard to feel any empathy; it’s easier and almost automatic to turn to the other direction, ignoring what happens there.

It’s a lack of care determined by a lack of information. Most of us aren’t selfishly choosing to look away, our only fault is being uneducated.

So we need to talk more about this issue, giving voice to the people who can’t fight for their own rights. But people don’t like to talk about ethics, nobody likes being asked to change their habits and stop supporting unethical companies.

This is why we need a strategy, we need to catch people’s attention in a subtle way, that will spark their curiosity and push them towards the will to listen and get to know more.