On the top floor of the Bendix Building, a dilapidated 11 story Gothic Revival style office building in the center of the Los Angeles fashion district, through slightly half open metal doors, I caught a glimpse of workers bending over to sew clothes on machines in dimly lit rooms. Piles of fabric were piled up on the felt floor. Lines, debris, and ash clumps are everywhere.
Suddenly, the doors were slammed shut one after another. Shit! Shit! Shit!
"Wow, the movements are quite fast," Mariela "Mar" Martinez said. She is responsible for managing the non-profit garment workers union center in Los Angeles. Someone recognized her and exchanged messages with each other.
Let's go down to the eighth floor. The workshop door on that floor has been closed and locked. The news of an unexpected visitor has spread throughout the entire building. We looked across the street from the end of the corridor and saw the Union Craft Building - another city center tower built in the early 20th century, which also had many unethical sweatshops inside. Its artistic decorative appearance is gradually deteriorating and collapsing. A few windows have been repainted with lime water and cannot be seen inside. Through the cracks on several tattered window sashes, we can hear sewing machines clattering inside.
We took the elevator from the Bendix building back to the ground floor and walked across the street. There is a cashier and a Latin man using a public phone in the lobby. Martinez explained to me that most of the workers in Los Angeles sweatshops come from Latin America, and most of the sweatshops are owned by Koreans. We climbed up the stairs to the third floor. The window glass is all broken. A man in his thirties, perhaps the manager here, sat smoking on the steps of a rusty fire escape. "Do you dare to walk down from here?" Martinez asked me. The steel cables of the fire escape are very thin, and the devices used to fix the walls have a history of a hundred years. It feels like if there are more than three people on it, they will not be able to bear it and will collapse directly. The fire escape has only been repaired to the second floor, so if you walk to the second floor and want to get down, you have to jump down. Below is a garbage bin.
"I call this the white noise of Los Angeles," Martinez told me as we tried to return to the street. "No one saw it or even if they did, they didn't want to admit it, but it was indeed here."
Los Angeles, USA
Nowadays, Los Angeles has become the largest clothing manufacturing center in the United States. The industry began in the early 20th century when local knitting factories began specializing in producing swimwear, with brands including Cole of California and Catalina. After World War II, the swimwear manufacturing industry continued to develop and became a "California style fashion" (a lightweight casual fashion cut) popular nationwide. Ultimately, in the early 1990s, Los Angeles replaced New York as the fashion production capital of the United States - the rising real estate prices in the downtown area and the North American Free Trade Agreement were a fatal blow to the fashion district.
