Blood Sweat and T-Shirts

This BBC Three series from May 2008 saw six young fashion addicts swap shopping on the high-street with working in India's cotton fields and clothes factories. Question is, can they handle a sewing machine and meet the target of two garments a minute. And whether their experience changed their throwaway attitude to clothes shopping.

This was quite a moving programme which clearly showed the emotions of the sweatshop workers and how poor their working conditions are. It struck me how their conditions seemed normal to them as they grew up and had gotten used to it. They only had one thought in their minds; and that was to earn money to give their children a good education and better lives than theirs.

This idea of physically being able to just say 'no I'm not putting up with this work anymore' could easily have happened, but it was the mental idea of working for their families that held the workers back and motivated them to put a lot of effort into their work. This was the message I felt I wanted to portray in my final idea, alongside the fact that their working area is limited and working conditions poor.