I found a new obsession this year. When I found an old spinning wheel at my parents’ house, it possessed me like few things have done in my adult life. I dreamed of spinning; I woke at 3am wondering if it was spinning time yet.

My sudden interest in spinning made me watch dozens of YouTube videos about the technique. I promptly purchased a drop spindle — a simple piece of technology that adds twist to fibre using gravity via a weighted and hooked stick. I read a book by an archeologist who studied shreds of textiles to understand women’s labour through time.

Participating in the creation of cloth, from fibre to finished object, links me to people across space and time. Wool is one of the oldest fibres worn by humans. Learning firsthand the mechanisms of spinning, weaving and knitting — chiefly, how slow they are — has helped me to appreciate the actual labour of creating fabric. This labour has been performed for millennia, by people not so different from me.

Spinning is a hobby for me, but the production of clothing is hard, poorly-paid work for many people around the world. We just need to check the labels on the clothes we're wearing. I’m wearing a cotton top made in India and a linen shirt and polyester skirt made in China. I try to imagine what life looks like for the person who made each item. It was probably a woman, working in a room full of other women bent over sewing machines. No robot has yet been able to match human dexterity for assembling clothing.

Most of the clothing for sale in New Zealand is imported, and opaque subcontracting processes mean that it’s difficult to know exactly where or how items are made. Most garment workers in the world aren’t part of a labour union, and most companies choose to produce clothing in places where labour is cheap and workers have little protection.

The New Zealand government — after years of pressure from World Vison and Tearfund — has committed to implementing modern-day slavery legislation which requires companies to report on their supply chains, but this only applies to companies worth more than $20 million. And companies need only report labour violation risks, not how these risks are being mitigated.

I spin for fun not work, and I sometimes think my concern with clothing is vain and superficial. Jesus urged people not to fuss about their clothing but to have faith that it would be given by God, like the beauty in creation: “See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labour or spin.” But then Jesus wasn’t talking to people who were worrying about what to wear — he was talking to people who were worrying about how they would be clothed. Jesus’s promise was that in God’s kingdom clothes — like food and water — would be abundant.

But in the system of clothing production today, which weaves the globe together as it creates environmental destruction and human rights violations, the people who make our clothes are often enslaved and impoverished — like those who in Jesus’s time would have struggled to clothe themselves. First, we must acknowledge that we are deeply connected to the people and places that make our clothes, and second, call for God’s grace to help change these ugly systems.

Tui Motu Magazine. Issue 288 December 2023: 26