Arts & history Assignment 4: Interview and Dialogue on The Textile and Apparel Industry in the 21st Century

On the 3rd of October 2017 I held two interviews on campus with two respondents to whom I posed the following three questions required by the assignment. My two respondents included my roommate, James, a second year student of Arts and History at UD. My second respondent was a stranger I approached outside UD main library soon after midday. His name was Kyle, 32 years old and a fan of baseball. Below are their responses to each of the questions posed. Apart from knowing that I take the course, James did not seem to know much about the course, FASH. But he did have a clue about what the course entails. He thinks that the Apparel industry is important to the global economy because clothes are a basic necessity that people will never stop using. For this reason, he believes that textile and apparel industries will continue to play an important role in today’s global economy. Admittedly James did not have a clue about any of the facts in the third question. Respondent 2, Kyle, on the other hand, did know that Apparel and textile industries were at the center of most policy discussions in the United States as well as the large amount of workforce that the industry employs. He did not know anything about FASH at UD and had a similar response as James to the second question with little variation. The body language of both, surprisingly, shifted between inquisitive and shocked. My conversation with mom was very enlightening as she knew quite a lot about the industry from her previous engagements with Fair trade and other industry regulators. On the case of East African countries obligations to international trade treaties like AGOA she feels that they should be allowed to ban second hand clothing in order to grow their own industries.