What we learned in school about labour and capital: it begins with the project of modernity, a history of domination and colonisation, which lead to the rise of the industrial revolution in the eighteenth century. From craft to looms and machines of mechanisation, our history books teach us that the nineteenth century was marked by the birth, rise, and making of standardised, industrial products. Capital derived from ‘the economy of machines and manufacturers,’ what the philosopher and inventor Charles Babbage marveled as ‘the accumulation of and science which has been directed to diminish the difficulty of producing manufactured goods.’¹ He was fascinated by the Jacquard-loom, which could reduce the number of hand weavers and rid of the artistry in human error, to create intricately uniform details of leaves and flowers into the tapestry of fabric. Man and machine, Babbage wrote, lead to the economy of human time. Only a tool, a technology, could do the work of many and increase the number of things made. Soon, new divisions of labour would become possible, the breaking down of tasks of both the human hand and mind, where the constant repetition of the same process would produce in the worker ‘a degree of excellence and rapidity in his particular department’ which could never be skillfully carried out by any single person.²

Time was once an elastic measure, embedded in social relations, where the cycles of the sun had dictated the hours of the day and where the waning daylight of winters shortened the communal work of the harvest. By the mid 1800s, a new sense of time emerged from the textile mills, creating new rhythms that regulated industrial life. Time was now quantified and incremental, its economy dependent upon on the repetitious rhythms of the body’s same movements over and over again on the assembly.³ It had become abstract, a scarce commodity, and an indication of when one was free, or when one was not. The historian E.P. Thompson also observed how labour transformed our inner schema, or apprehension of time.⁴ People were now workers or employers who could not escape the anxieties of industrial time, as it appeared in every aspect of public life, from the church clock, clocks in town markets and squares, the grandfather clock inside the home, the pocket watch that hung from bodies. Industrial time even rang as sound, from the morning bell to curfew, the sound of the whistle and time stamp, the tick tock of hands that divided hours to minutes to seconds (today it glows through our iPhones). Work and life was neatly demarcated. Time had become the shackle of all workers.

On the assembly, industrial time subjugated worker’s movements, demanding a synchronicity that was anathema to the human body. Charlie Chaplin mocks this subjugation in workers’ movements, whose gestures were meticulously adjusted to working specific parts of the assembly. Chaplin mimics the fragmented movements – his tightening of screws carries out in stutters, hiccups, jolts and jerks, in staccato bits of movement.⁵ We can’t help but laugh when we see his inability to keep up, throwing chaos into the machinery and making it explode. Chaplin’s funny movements liberate the working body, reminding its audience of human capacity and experience. In the philosopher Walter Benjamin’s commentary on the film, he argued that laughter was critical to bringing us back to our senses and out from of our numbed alienation in time, labour, and capital. Film and the moving image of the body on screen could powerfully mirror back to us human experience, counteracting the body’s systematic subjugation in labour through comedy.

Today, time is no longer just the wage clock and time stamp – in global capitalism, it is now a never-ending twenty-four hour global day in the ‘just in time economy.’ It’s synchronisation globally has produced a new world of coordinated logistics with automated ports, timed with the movement of ships, cranes, planes, and millions of dock workers, port workers, seafarers, warehouse workers, truckers and rail workers who ship as many as four hundred packages and fill six million containers at any given moment.⁶ The build out of ports in the 1980s lead to the rise of the transnational corporation, producing both a retail revolution in the U.S. and Western Europe and the world’s biggest factories in history in Asia. Inside the world’s global garment factories, the measurement of time on the assembly was further fragmented into some hundreds of tasks, where workers’ bodily movements were punctiliously measured as ‘standard allowed minutes.’ Detailing the number of operations, length of seams, fabric type and stitching accuracy of workers performance, these new metrics estimated the exact time and cost of making a garment, dehumanising labor to determine ‘factory capacity’ for global companies.

All this takes on new meanings and scales when it comes to Made in China. The U.S. and Europe’s largest retail companies manufacture in China’s newly built factories in special economic zones that attract foreign investment free of any regulation. This was part of the Open Door Policy by Deng Xiaoping that resulted in the privatisation of all state-enterprises and industries in China. By 2005, most everything Americans bought and wore — sneakers and sweaters, electronics, toys, Christmas decorations, and furniture — was marketed by four-lettered global companies such as NIKE, IKEA, APPLE, ZARA and manufactured in China. Of the 130 million migrant workers who toiled in these factories across the Pearl River Delta, from Guangzhou to Shanghai, 6.5 million were garment workers alone. Labour powered factories so large, that as many as 400,000 workers could be found working in one building alone.⁷ For the last three decades, these migrant workers left behind their villages to head for the city to service China’s headlong rush into global economic supremacy. They also left behind their children with grandparents, along with their youth and vitality. Today, migrant workers still consistently work twenty-nine days for fifteen-hour days straight. They will take the four-day train ride to their homes, once a year, to celebrate one holiday – the New Year.⁸

I have learned that this is what Capital with a big C, through labour, can now do. For the last three decades in the U.S., Wal-Mart in partnership with Made in China allows Americans to Make America Great Again, as one can now feel wealthy by affording cheap food, clothing, things of all kinds despite one’s lack of healthcare, job security, a free education, housing and public transport. Nevertheless, this kind of capital can give us jeans that are rhinestoned, sandblasted, embroidered, sequined, silkscreened, tasseled and frayed. We can mine for tantalum, gold, tin and tungsten as far as Cerro Rico, Inner Mongolia, and the Congo for those irresistible metallic rose gold iPhones.⁹ We can order formula and diapers on JD.com and UPS.com and have them dropped off to us by drone in some rural town.¹⁰ We carry on Twitter culture wars and learn from YouTube videos, whose algorithms lead us to makeup tutorials and white supremacist fringe communities, all in one go. We have TikTok memes and musers entertaining 500 million monthly active users who boast of one billion downloads. According to philosophers, we’ve become the digital swarm that rages on, where each post, tap, click, swipe, zoom or like is a vote to be tracked and monetised.¹¹ The mature among us warn of our suspended senses and the general distraction that is now our daily affective condition. We tell our young that they have yet to wake up, though in the reality of this 24/7 cycle the young have not even gotten the chance to fall asleep.¹²

The protests in Hong Kong continue to swell because the young see in China a factory for the world.¹³ They understand that our fast-fashion, sneakers and metallic rose gold electronics have produced wealth for a few, and built only the backs of low-waged rural migrants without unions, a free press, or rule of law. In this city, the booksellers continue to mysteriously disappear. I’ve learned that if the protests had been in Shenzhen or Shanghai, it would have been another Tiananmen. In this hyper life of capital, the young and old alike seek out the meaning to all this – how to radically break down the barriers of work and life? How to re-enchant this social world, reactivate and recover our sense of collective agency, find meaning in the interstices of time? We are only human when our instinct tells us to seek escape from the homogenising processes of these modern times.

I think of all this as I pack up my belongings — all the stuff of my kids and family — from a rotting old house in the Hudson Valley to another one in the woods. I feel so far from the factory behemoths, of men and machines and industrial histories that I have spent my career learning about from textbooks. Here, I am reminded of a different kind of time in capital – the biological time that naturally resists it – where the crevices of days, one’s relationships with people and things, only heighten the awareness of mortality. Not men and machines, I think, but rather women and children in the kind of work that doesn’t seem to fit so neatly into the assembly or the measurements of some industrial clock or twenty-four-hour work day. This is an imperfect and preindustrial sense of time — of mothering and daughtering and preserving human life — which forces one to abandon any kind of synchronicity. The labourers were out in the fields, the factories and offices, or even out in the streets striking, but only because the women were at home, carrying out the invisible work taking care of the children and the elderly. Maintaining life is both hard labour and creative practice, as one in the same, continuing the next generation of workers while burying those who have perish after a lifetime of toil.

In the middle of my move, I pack boxes of things and throw other things away. So many things are thrown out. The opening up of closets, trunks, and boxes reminds me of the basement closet I hid in as a child, while my parents worked in the adjacent room painting cheap costume jewellery under fluorescent lights. The clothes smelled of mothballs and mildew, damp wool and old fur. Its rafters held my mother’s secret stash of cash and bills. The clothes in this closet — of dresses and jackets — were worn so long ago, pictured only in faded photos, worn on bodies before having children, when my mother was a different person, a young working woman in the city making money for only herself. Opening up of closets, like the one of my great aunt in her tiny West Village studio apartment, where she packed away a lifetime of small collected things that she never again revisited. After my great aunt passed, I found in her closet a pair of worn shoes – I can see them in a photo from when she was twelve. A small beaded purse wrapped in its dusty original tissue paper. An album of wedding photos in a six-week marriage I had never known about, with her husband cut out of every picture. Here is another photo of my great aunt in her in cap and gown. While the war raged on in her home country, while my fourteen-year old impoverished father was digging ditches to bury his family, her family’s wealth allowed her to escape to Paris and then to New York. On my gloomiest of days, I still walk by her old apartment thinking of my mother, my father, and her.

I am throwing out the clothing of my children, full of stains that make none of it worth saving, all evidence of their world of hard-play. Their clothes turned tattered from climbing, from throwing mud, getting snagged on trees and bushes, elbows and knees completely worn out. I ask my daughter to wash off the dust from her once shiny and new black boots – the black boots that the ninety-three year old horse lady who lives down the road from our new place told her was the most exciting thing for her to see and smell. ‘How many years does a horse live?’ I once asked the horse lady, only for her to quickly snap back, ‘but how many years for a human?’ making me think about this comment all summer long. On this hot summer day, I fish out from my closet my wedding dress only to find it with different coloured yellowed sweat stains on the bodice and deep black and grey mold mottled on the bottom. Though ruined, I save it not for my daughter but for the relief it brought for my mother, in hiding her shame for my six-month belly buried underneath these yards of lace. There’s a pile of old jeans and old bed sheets to wash too, though I know the bloodstains are permanent. This too reminds me of a different kind of time lived, which will soon enough arrive and be understood by my daughter. I am packing things up and throwing things away – this accumulation of obsolete things, used up, broken junk, which only I give my arbitrary value to. I think of Primo Levi in the camp, telling the story of survival from just a few key possessions — a spoon, a bowl, a piece of string, a button, a tin cup — which he also said put one at risk of getting killed.¹⁴

For some reason and at this age, I know these things — that these things made by others who have traded in lives and labour and that I have accumulated in one house — that sadly, none of this will even matter. That I have been in the houses of ninety-three olds — capsules of another time in beauty — with all those things now just rotting away, a burden for her children to clean out. When we stand in the horse lady’s house, my daughter only points out the birds’ nests in the rafters, a thing of beauty among the decay. I am moving out of my house so that my eighty-three-year old father will not hesitate to visit me — I bought a house without any steps — since, as he reminds me daily, I only have two more years with him yet. Eyes that can no longer thread a needle, ears hard of hearing, bodies that work to breathe and move forward. The horse lady will be gone. The terror that my parents will die soon, that I have just a few more years with my own children, before long they too will leave me for good. Will they remember how many times I dressed them, fed them, loved and cared for them? I have already forgotten this with my own parents. In the regulated and regimented hours of present day, I seek out a time and a place to understand these ungoverned thoughts.

Clothing and capital I have learned through grand structural histories of ‘the way things work,’ explained to me as men and machines and assemblies. And yet here I am, packing it up and throwing it away, thinking of the workers, my mother, my father, my children, my great aunt, what Primo Levi said about a spoon and a cup. These days, I can’t shake that ghostly photo of discarded clothes in dry arroyos abandoned by migrants in the Sonoma desert.¹⁵ I think of the images of garment workers’ daughters in cramped apartments in Chinatown.¹⁶ I’ve been consumed all summer by that photo of a baby held by a father, drowned in the Rio Grande — the very same river my mother-in-law was born next to — face down in the water.¹⁷ Only the black cloth of his own T-shirt prevented his baby daughter from washing away. Such anguish I feel these days, when thinking of clothing and capital. In between days, I crave something beyond formal histories and seek closets as interstices to history. These things I look at and pack up and throw away have me thinking of all these lives lived. There seems to be no economy to any of this. There is only survival, the maintenance and preservation of life, and the communal remembrance of it.

Dr. Christina Mooon is an anthropologist by training and an assistant professor of Fashion Studies in the School of Art and Design History and Theory at the The New School for Design in New York.

This article was originally published in Vestoj On Capital, available for purchase here.

1. C Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufacturers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. First published in 1832. ↩

2. Ibid. ↩

3. E.P Thompson, ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’ in The Making of the English Working Class, London: Victor Gollancz, Ltd./Vintage Books, 1963. ↩

4. Ibid. ↩

5. W Benjamin, ‘The Formula in Which the Dialectical Structure of Film Finds Expression’ (1935) trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, in Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 3, ed. Michael W. Jennings et al. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. ↩

6. See A Madrigal, ‘Containers.’ Audio blog post. Episode 1: Welcome to Global Capitalism. Medium, 7 April 2017. Web. 28 July 2019. ↩

7. Freeman, Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018. ↩

8. The Last Train Home. Directed by Lixin Fan, Zietgeist Films, 3 September 2010. ↩

9. B Merchant, The One Device: the Secret History of the iPhone, New York: Bay Back Books, 2017; L Browning, ‘Where Apple Gets the Tantalum For Your iPhone.’ Newsweek Magazine, February 4 2015; R Mead, ‘The Semiotics of “Rose Gold,’ The New Yorker, September 14 2015.  ↩

10. J Fan, ‘How E-Commerce is Transforming Rural China,’ The New Yorker, July 18 2018. ↩

11. B Chul Han, In the Swarm: Digital Prospects, Untimely Meditations (Book 3), Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017. ↩

12. See J Crary, 24/7: Later Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, New York: Verso, 2013. ↩

13. A Weiwei, ‘Can Hong Kong’s Resistance Win?’ New York Times, July 12 2019. ↩

14. P Levi, Survival in Aushwitz: If This is a Man, Orion Press, 1959. ↩

15. R Barnes, ‘Debris Field Left By Migrants on U.S. Side of the Border, 2012.’ http://www.richardbarnes.net/state-of-exception. ↩

16. C Chang, ‘The Daughters of Garment Workers,’ USA, New York City. 1996. https://pro.magnumphotos.com/Asset/-2K7O3RC16RC.html ↩

17. J LeDuc, Photo of the bodies of Salvadoran migrant Oscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his nearly 2-year-old daughter Valeria, on the bank of the Rio Grande in Matamoros, Mexico, trying to cross the river to Brownsville, Texas, June 24 2019. The Associated Press, originally published in La Jornada. See https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/25/they-wanted-the-american-dream-reporter-reveals-story-behind-tragic-photo ↩

IN MILAN AND PARIS, she went from boutique to boutique, morning to night, like one possessed. They did no sightseeing at all. Instead of the Duomo or the Louvre, they saw Valentino, Missoni, Saint Laurent, Givenchy,  Ferragamo, Armani, Cerutti, Gianfranco Ferré. Mesmerised, she swept up everything she could get her hands on, and he followed behind her, paying the bills. He almost worried that the raised digits on his credit card might wear down.

Her fever did not abate after they returned to Japan. She continued to buy new clothes nearly every day. The number of articles of clothing in her possession skyrocketed. To store them, Tony had several large armoires custom made. He also had a cabinet built for her shoes. Even so, there was not enough space for everything. In the end, he had an entire room redesigned as a walk-in closet. They had rooms to spare in their large house,  and money was not a problem. Besides, she did such a marvellous job of wearing what she bought, and she looked so happy whenever she had new clothes, that Tony decided not to complain. Nobody’s perfect, he told himself. When the volume of her clothing became too great to fit into the special room, however, even Tony Takitani began to have some misgivings. Once, when she was out, he counted her dresses. He calculated that she could change outfits twice a day and still not repeat herself for almost two years.

She was so busy buying them that she had no time to wear them. He wondered if she might have a psychological problem. If so, he might need to apply the brakes to her habit at some point.

He took the plunge one night after dinner. ‘I wish you would consider cutting back a little on the way you buy clothes,’ he said. ‘It’s not a question of money. I’m not talking about that. I have no objection to your buying what you need, and it makes me happy to see you looking so pretty, but do you really need so many expensive dresses?’

His wife lowered her gaze and thought about this for a time. Then she looked at him and said, ‘You’re right, of course. I don’t need so many dresses. I know that. But, even though I know it, I can’t help myself. When I see a beautiful dress, I have to buy it. Whether I need it, or whether I have too many, is beside the point. I just can’t stop myself.’ She promised to try to hold back. ‘If I keep on going this way, the whole house is going to fill up with my clothes before too long.’

And so she locked herself inside for a week, and managed to stay away from clothing stores. This was a time of great suffering for her. She felt as if she were walking on the surface of a planet with little air. She spent every day in her room full of clothing, taking down one piece after another to gaze at it.

She would caress the material, inhale its fragrance, slip the clothes on, and look at herself in the mirror. But the more she looked the more she wanted something new. The desire for new clothing became unbearable. She simply couldn’t stand it.She did, however, love her husband deeply. And she respected him. She knew that he was right. She called one of her favourite boutiques and asked the proprietor if she might be allowed to return a coat and dress that she had bought ten days earlier but had never worn. ‘Certainly, Madam,’ she was told. She was one of the store’s best customers; they could do that much for her. She put the coat and dress in her blue Renault Cinque and drove to the fashionable Aoyama district. There she returned the clothes and received a credit. She hurried back to her car, trying not to look at anything else, then drove straight home. She had a certain feeling of lightness at having returned the clothes. Yes, she told herself, it was true: I did not need those things. I have enough coats and dresses to last the rest of my life. But, as she waited for a red light to change, the coat and dress were all she could think about. Colours, cut, and texture: she remembered them in vivid detail.

She could picture them as clearly as if they were in front of her. A film of sweat broke out on her forehead. With her forearms pressed against the steering wheel, she drew in a long, deep breath and closed her eyes. At the very moment that she opened them again, she saw the light change to green. Instinctively, she stepped down on the accelerator.

A large truck that was trying to make it across the intersection on a yellow light slammed into the side of her Renault at full speed. She never felt a thing.

Tony Takitani was left with a roomful of size-2 dresses and a hundred and twelve pairs of shoes. He had no idea what to do with them. He was not going to keep all his wife’s clothes for the rest of his life, so he called a dealer and agreed to sell the hats and accessories for the first price the man offered. Stockings and underthings he bunched together and burned in the garden incinerator. There were simply too many dresses and shoes to deal with, so he left them where they were. After the funeral, he shut himself in the walk-in closet, and spent the day staring at the rows of clothes.

Ten days later, Tony Takitani put an ad in the newspaper for a female assistant, dress size 2, height approximately five feet three, shoe size 6, good pay, favourable working conditions. Because the salary he quoted was abnormally high, thirteen women showed up at his studio in Minami-Aoyama to be interviewed. Five of them were obviously lying about their dress size.

From the remaining eight, he chose the one whose build was closest to his wife’s, a woman in her mid-twenties with an unremarkable face. She wore a plain white blouse and a tight blue skirt. Her clothes and shoes were neat and clean but worn.

Tony Takitani told the woman, ‘The work itself is not very difficult. You just come to the office every day from nine to five, answer the telephone, deliver illustrations, pick up materials for me, make copies – that sort of thing. There is only one condition attached. I’ve recently lost my wife, and I have a huge amount of her clothing at home. Most of what she left is new or almost new. I would like you to wear her things as a kind of uniform while you work here. I know this must sound strange to you but, believe me, I have no ulterior motive. It’s just to give me time to get used to the idea that my wife is gone. If you are nearby wearing her clothing, I’m pretty sure, it will finally come home to me that she is dead.’

Biting her lip, the young woman considered the proposal. It was, as he said, a strange request – so strange, in fact, that she could not fully comprehend it. She understood the part about his wife’s having died. And she understood the part about the wife’s having left behind a lot of clothing. But she could not quite grasp why she should have to work in the wife’s clothes. Normally,  she would have had to assume that there was more to it than met the eye.

But, she thought, this man did not seem to be a bad person. You had only to listen to the way he talked to know that. Maybe the loss of his wife had done something to his mind, but he didn’t look like the type of man who would let that kind of thing cause him to harm another person. And, in any case, she needed work. She had been looking for a job for a very long time, her unemployment insurance was about to run out, and she would probably never find a job that paid as well as this one did.

‘I think I understand,’ she said. ‘And I think I can do what you are asking me to do. But, first, I wonder if you can show me the clothes I will have to wear. I had better check to see if they really are my size.’

‘Of course,’ Tony Takitani said, and he took the woman to his house and showed her the room. She had never seen so many dresses gathered together in a single place except in a department store. Each dress was obviously expensive and of high quality. The taste, too, was flawless. The sight was almost blinding. The woman could hardly catch her breath. Her heart started pounding. It felt like sexual arousal, she realised.

Tony Takitani left the woman alone in the room. She pulled herself together and tried on a few of the dresses. She tried on some shoes as well.

Everything fit as though it had been made for her. She looked at one dress after another. She ran her fingertips over the material and breathed in the fragrance. Hundreds of beautiful dresses were hanging there in rows. Before long, tears welled up in her eyes and began to pour out of her. There was no way she could hold them back. Her body swathed in a dress of the woman who had died, she stood utterly still, sobbing, struggling to keep the sound from escaping her throat. Soon Tony Takitani came to see how she was doing.

‘Why are you crying?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I’ve never seen so many beautiful dresses before. I think it must have upset me. I’m sorry.’ She dried her tears with a handkerchief.

‘If it’s all right with you, I’d like to have you start at the office tomorrow,’ Tony said in a businesslike manner. ‘Pick out a week’s worth of dresses and shoes and take them home with you.’

The woman devoted a lot of time to choosing six days’ worth of dresses. Then she chose shoes to match. She packed everything into a suitcase.

‘Take a coat, too,’ Tony Takitani said. ‘You don’t want to be cold.’

She chose a warm-looking grey cashmere coat. It was so light that it could have been made of feathers. She had never held such a lightweight coat in her life.

When the woman was gone, Tony Takitani went back into his wife’s closet,  shut the door, and let his eyes wander vacantly over her dresses. He could not understand why the woman had cried when she saw them. To him, they looked like shadows that his wife had left behind. Size-2 shadows of his wife hung there in long rows, layer upon layer, as if someone had gathered and hung up samples of the infinite possibilities (or at least the theoretically infinite possibilities) implied in the existence of a human being.

These dresses had once clung to his wife’s body, which had endowed them with the warm breath of life and made them move. Now, however, what hung before him were mere scruffy shadows, cut off from the roots of life and steadily withering away, devoid of any meaning whatsoever. Their rich colours danced in space like pollen rising from flowers, lodging in his eyes and ears and nostrils. The frills and buttons and lace and epaulets and pockets and belts sucked greedily at the room’s air, thinning it out until he could hardly breathe. Liberal numbers of mothballs gave off a smell that might as well have been the sound of a million tiny winged insects.

He hated these dresses now, it suddenly occurred to him. Slumping against the wall, he folded his arms and closed his eyes. Loneliness seeped into him once again,  like a lukewarm broth. It’s all over now, he told himself. No matter what I do, it’s over.

He called the woman and told her to forget about the job. There was no longer any work for her to do, he said, apologising.

Yuki Kitazumi is an illustrator based in Tokyo.

‘Tony Takitani’ was originally published in The New Yorker on April 15, 2002.