Why Fashion Manufacturing Content Is Taking Over TikTok

THE VIDEOS AREN’T about fashion, exactly, nor are they about trends, quite. One begins with a striking graphic of a bird-like dinosaur skeleton – the logo of the outdoor brand Arc’teryx – being printed onto piles of black material. In another, the distinctive nude fabric of Kim Kardashian’s underwear label, Skims, spins around in a massive industrial washing machine. Elsewhere, a piece of specialised equipment rigorously tests a zipper popular with leading sneaker brands, subjecting it to thousands of opening-and-closing cycles.

A common thread running through these videos is their setting: unremarkable, industrial-looking warehouses in middle-of-nowhere locations. Yet, amazingly, each has gone viral. For William Lasry, a 25-year-old content creator from Montreal, Canada, this phenomenon is no longer surprising. Over the past two years, he has built a devoted online following by peeling back the curtain on fashion manufacturing. Lasry believes that everyone should have a deeper understanding of how their clothes are made – echoing his tagline, “No more gatekeeping”. In an industry famous for its lack of transparency, though, he has his work cut out for him.

Typically, Lasry’s videos take viewers inside factories all around the world, with a special focus on menswear, and feature conversations with suppliers at trade shows. “Asking Famous Clothing Factories Their Prices” has received more than one million views on YouTube, where he has 337,000 subscribers. In another low-fi, minute-long video he posted to his 494,000 followers on TikTok, a supplier at the sprawling Canton Fair in Guangzhou, China, explains minimum-order quantities – or MOQs in manufacturing parlance – for a new range of knitwear. The airless room, the harsh lighting, the relentless background noise – fashion rarely looks less cool or inspiring than this. Yet the video has six million views.

If you spend long enough watching Lasry’s content, you will find out where some of the biggest and most prestigious fashion brands source and manufacture their clothes. Burberry, Alexander McQueen, Stone Island, C.P. Company, Palace, Supreme, Moncler, Acne Studios, Gucci – the list goes on. Everything from the country of origin to how much things really cost is dissected and then evaluated.

Since posting his first video in 2022, Lasry has taken field trips to Colombia, China, Turkey, Portugal, Italy and India. Sometimes he arrives with nothing more than a hunch. “It’s all about having your back against the wall. At least that’s how I operate best,” he says. But these journeys haven’t always gone smoothly. On his first and longest trip, two months up and down Japan, “I reached out to 96 different factories before I left,” he says. “I’d spent so much time finding them, but of those 96 factories, only one got back to me. It said no.”

When he landed, he felt clueless. Three weeks later, the same. “I tried my best to hustle my way into factories. I spoke to clothing store owners. I did everything I could think of. But nothing worked,” he says. His lucky break came through the friend he was travelling with. “He had a social media account where he interviews people about leading a more fulfilling life. A young woman reached out to him, wanting to meet him and feature.” It turned out that she worked for a traditional Japanese denim maker – “the biggest fluke of all time!” Lasry says. “The moment she mentioned her job, my eyes lit up. I was like, I can’t fucking believe this.”

The following weekend, they ended up at her boss’ denim factory. Lasry crafted a pair of jeans from scratch himself, capturing every snip and stitch along the way, and later shared videos of the process on his various social media accounts. “After that, everything changed,” he says. “One factory owner connected me with another, and things spiralled out of control, in a good way.” By the time he got home, he had 50,000 new Instagram followers.

Although his travel content primarily showcases factories he endorses, Lasry also draws attention to those that employ subpar practices. In his 16-minute YouTube video, “Rating Fashion Brands By Their Factories” (tagline: “Your favourite brands keep their factories a secret, but I don’t believe in that”), he commends the “pretty high” quality of clothing from Aimé Leon Dore. On his improvised scoreboard, he positions the New York brand’s logo squarely between A and B.

Meanwhile, he awards Burberry an A. The brand’s factory in Japan, Matsumaru, also supplies renowned labels like Sacai and Comme des Garçons and is responsible for the precise cutting and sewing of Burberry’s iconic heritage trench coats. For this stage of production, Matsumaru charges $350 per item – excluding fabrics and trimmings. “When it comes to value and quality,” Lasry says, “Burberry truly stands out.”

The streetwear brand Bape, maybe harshly, earns a D. But the real blow comes when Lasry relegates Fear of God to a category all its own, bluntly labelled ‘poop’.

“Sourcing models across fashion are being broken open across TikTok and Instagram . . . but the industry remains quite closed”

Footage of fashion factories might be the last thing you’d expect to cut through the noise on social media. But Lasry’s content is proving wildly popular with younger consumers especially, whose interest in fashion extends beyond showing off their outfits to understanding where their clothes actually come from. Designers looking to break into the industry also follow Lasry for access to resources that big brands have traditionally kept secret. While attending the Copenhagen International Fashion Fair in August, one of Europe’s largest and most influential trade shows, I spoke with around 50 brands, and roughly half were familiar with Lasry’s work, praising it enthusiastically.

Colin Meredith, an emerging designer, tells me: “I resonate with the overall theme of Will’s work: accessibility and encouraging others to be more creative”. Even though Meredith has already launched his own brand, collaborating with the likes of JJJJound and Louis Vuitton along the way, he says: “I’m still here taking notes from Will. Sourcing models across fashion are being broken open across TikTok and Instagram, especially over the past couple of years, but the industry remains quite closed. There is no Rolodex to help you find a factory or a mill. The only reason brands are opening up is due to increased pressure from consumers. It’s certainly not coming from the industry’s open, warm heart.”

Conversely, for the same reasons, there’s another type of person keeping close tabs on Lasry. “Important figures in the industry are certainly aware of him,” reveals an executive from a global luxury fashion brand, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “I often find myself watching his content with a sense of unease. While he highlights both the good and the bad, we would ideally prefer not to be featured at all. The same goes for our manufacturing partners.”

Wherever you look across the fashion industry, supply chains remain complex and highly opaque. Often, it’s done on purpose. Insiders note that brands frequently enforce strict confidentiality when it comes to where and how their clothes are made, which explains the blurred logos in some of Lasry’s videos or the abrupt cuts in footage. “NDAs [non-disclosure agreements] have become so pervasive,” Lasry says. “My goal is to change thismentality.”

@wlasry Diesel nylon skirt factory @glassfactory.info full video on youtube #cantonfair #manufacturing #glassfactory ♬ original sound - Will Lasry

PEOPLE OFTEN CRITICISE how TikTok drives demand for throwaway, ‘micro trends’. Yet at the same time, the platform is also facilitating what could be the most impactful analysis of the fashion industry to date. Within traditional media and academic circles, countless in-depth reports on fashion sustainability exist. But they often lack the reach and cultural impact that the biggest social media platforms can offer.

TikTok is where I learned about Lasry. Watching him geek out over Yeezy Gap’s factory in Japan – home to one of the few remaining tsuri-ami-ki, or loopwheel knitting machines, in the world – was entertaining and informative. Soon the algorithm directed me to other creators like him. One day I had never seen inside a luxury menswear factory; the next, they were everywhere, in countless videos across dozens of accounts.

I’d stumbled into a new corner of the internet: a place where fashion-loving bros talk about the relative merits of various brands’ supply chains, upcycling and the concept of “underconsumption core”. Many of them had ring lights and smooth, good-looking faces seemingly made for the camera. Among them was Andrew Burgess, better known as @wandythemaker to his 395,000 TikTok followers.

Burgess admits he isn’t the biggest environmental activist in the world, but he is seriously good at upcycling second-hand materials into clothes people go crazy for. One of his most popular videos shows him turning thrifted cartoon blankets into trousers, while another depicts him making tote bags from the back pockets of jeans.

Brands aren’t blind to this new wave of content creators shaping consumer behaviour around better manufacturing and consumption habits. In fact, in an unorthodox marketing move, some have started inviting these creators into their factories.

Burgess got the call in April 2023. Puma invited him and three other Gen Z creators from England, France and Germany to spend a year reviewing its sustainability initiatives and share their findings with their audiences in any way they liked. No strings attached. “We’ve always documented our progress in sustainable practices,” Puma’s chief sourcing officer, Anne-Laure Descours, said in a statement when the project launched. “However,” she continued, “the information we share isn’t always easily understood by the next generation. We recognise the need for change, and we’re committed to making sustainability more accessible and transparent to everyone.”

As part of the initiative, called ‘Voices of a Re:Generation’, Burgess visited three of Puma’s factories. “They were awesome. All of them were super-modern,” he says. “There are so many things you don’t think about when it comes to manufacturing at scale; so many moving parts and complexities you can only get a picture of when you’re up close. Brands always try to sell us products without listening to our expectations regarding what we want and how those products are made. Working on projects like this with brands like Puma feels like an important step forwards.”

“Garment manufacturing is one giant Rubik’s Cube of a challenge. To succeed, you need to be a great problem solver”

The resulting content, including a series of films showcasing the German sportswear giant’s factories in Bangladesh, Vietnam and Turkey, has been largely well received. But such stunts don’t always have their intended effect. Recently, experts have been warning that factory-focused content – especially when it’s created by brands – often presents an incomplete narrative. And when it comes to these kinds of stunt backflipping, one recent example stands out above the rest: the unforgettable Shein fiasco.

Anyone within the blast radius of the fashion industry knows by now what happened. In June 2023, the Chinese fast fashion giant, valued at around US$70 billion, was facing a surge of negative press. Investigative journalists from the UK’s Channel 4 had recently uncovered that employees at Shein factories were working 18-hour days for shockingly low wages. Bloomberg News had also conducted laboratory tests and found that some of Shein’s clothing contained cotton sourced from Xinjiang, China, where Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities are forced to work under conditions of forced labour.

In an effort to rehabilitate its public image, Shein claimed it does not contract manufacturers in Xinjiang and stated that most of its cotton is sourced elsewhere. Later, it raised the stakes by sending a squad of social media influencers to what it called one of its “main supply manufacturers”.

These influencers duly gushed about the tidy factory and cheerful employees. But the campaign immediately backfired when one influencer’s video tour went viral and Shein was buried under a huge pile-on. As a Vice headline aptly put it: “How Do You Convince People Your Sweatshop is Cool? Pay an influencer To Tour It.” The videos showcased a pristine warehouse where workers stood smiling behind ironing boards.

Dani DMC – who describes herself as a “confidence activist” – released a now-deleted video on TikTok saying that she had seen with her “own two eyes what the entire process of Shein clothing looks like from beginning to end”. She continued: “Shein is aware of every single rumour and instead of staying quiet it is fighting with all of its power to not only show us the truth but continue to improve and be the best it can possibly be”.

Destene Sudduth, also part of the visiting squad, said in a TikTok video to four million followers of her own: “Upon interviewing the workers, a lot of them were really confused and taken back [sic] with the child labour questions . . . They weren’t even sweating. We were the ones sweating!”

Critics argued that Shein was trying to obscure poor working conditions in other parts of its supply chain, and questioned whether the factory shown was specifically created for the event. (Hence why these video tours went so viral.) In response, Shein reiterated its commitment to transparency and insisted that the content produced was genuine.

The point is, fashion factories are now receiving unprecedented levels of attention. Historically, only the companies that went into business with them were allowed to look inside. The result was that, with few exceptions, little was known about the information shaping these factories’ behaviour. But this position is becoming increasingly untenable, even if Lasry and his peers are only just getting started.

GIVEN THAT FACTORIES occupy a central role in a multi-trillion dollar industry, the shift has been a long time coming. “The concept of sustainability was a joke when I started the business 10 years ago. We were practically begging brands to do better for the environment but all they ever said was, ‘Maybe next time’,” says Zack Sartor, who owns a zero-waste clothing factory in East London called Apparel Tasker, which manufactures some 5000 units a week for a variety of big luxury and smaller independent brands.

His was the only factory that gave me access while researching this story. Several others declined, and many didn’t even respond. During my tour on a late summer afternoon, Sartor tells me about the solar panels on the roof, the energy-saving motors attached to each of the 60 sewing machines, and various other eco-related highlights – which don’t come cheap, and less so a decade ago, when his factory opened. Though you couldn’t quite hear a pin drop, it was far closer to silent than I had expected.

Sartor, 31, never imagined he would be running a garment factory. He left his home in Toronto, Canada to study fashion design and luxury-brand management at Istituto Marangoni in Paris. After a brief return home, he decided to launch a fashion brand in London with his girlfriend, Sophia Massarella. (She is now his fiancée and manages Polentina, an Italian canteen located within Apparel Tasker that overlooks the production lines. Over the past two years, it has become one of the most talked-about restaurants in London, maintaining the same zero-waste ethos as the factory.) Their fashion brand didn’t go anywhere. Nor could Sartor find a job working as a designer for someone else. “After dozens of interviews, I realised that while the market was saturated with designers, there was a significant demand for sample makers, technical services and production.”

So, he started specialising in bespoke manufacturing for small brands, hiring three sewing machinists to work alongside him in his tiny bedroom. “I was living in a shared apartment back then, so we couldn’t even use the living room,” he remembers. “I definitely owe those ladies a steak dinner.”

In 2014, a chance meeting led him to purchase a small part of the East London facility, which he now owns in its entirety. “Garment manufacturing is one giant Rubik’s Cube of a challenge. To succeed, you need to be a great problem solver,” he says.

“Thankfully the major players – governments and brands alike – are now making sustainability a permanent focus. The largest factories are also becoming quite savvy about it – so much so they’re beginning to outrun us.”

Nevertheless, the industry remains full of murky players. “Sometimes a brand will ship garments from China to Italy without buttons,” Sartor explains, “as adding them at the final stage allows the product to be labelled ‘Made in Italy’, according to Italian law.”

Worse still: “I’ve seen someone use a forklift to pick up a pile of fabric, drive it over to a garbage pile, smoke a cigarette, then pick the fabric back up, return it to its original spot and put a ‘deadstock’ label on it with tape. It’s the Wild West out there.”

Sartor is keen to remind everyone that factories are just one part of the fashion jigsaw. “There’s a process before something arrives at the factory, and another process afterwards,” he says. “Is there enough examination into the chemicals that go into the materials in the first place? What about over-consumption?”

Apparel Tasker publishes its eco policies and waste reports online for anyone to look at. But as supply chains and manufacturing standards become increasingly complex – whether by accident or design – Sartor admits to “feeling a little lost sometimes”. “I’d love for there to be a centralised system where you could input all your data into a digital program that generates a score. Then, everyone could use this same system, leading to greater transparency across the industry.”

LASRY THINKS HE has found a solution of his own. He has invested all the money he has earned from content creation and brand consulting to launch a new platform called Glass Factory. Every aspect of his work today – the visits to factories around the world, the extensive research to determine who makes what and where – has informed this new business venture.

Glass Factory highlights manufacturers it has meticulously vetted based on various criteria, including certifications, the brands they partner with, treatment of their workers and management style.

“Often, we spend an entire day with the factory owner to get a sense of their personality,” Lasry says. His team also creates highly produced short films about them. The aim is for it to appeal to those wanting to make clothes, as well as consumers who care about quality and the health of the planet. A tiered pricing system is in place offering access to hundreds of factories, one-off consultations and full management of production.

According to Lasry, Glass Factory doesn’t exist to expose the worst offenders. Instead, it seeks to demystify the perceived value or stigmas around manufacturing in certain countries. His team is addressing this on a factory-by-factory basis. “We’re trying to change the way people label things. We no longer want ‘Made in China’ and ‘Made in Italy’. Because there’s good Italy and there’s bad Italy; the same with China. So, we believe the factory is much more important than the country. We want to create a gold standard in manufacturing where we have our own ‘Glass Factory’ care labels – a seal of approval to show it has been manufactured using our network.”

This movement towards higher production standards has also seen some brands take manufacturing into their own hands. Earlier this year, Song for the Mute acquired a factory in Marrickville, Sydney, which will handle all the brand’s manufacturing moving forward. “We decided to have our own factory because it will let us gain speed, test products, control costs, remove the MOQs surcharges and give us the flexibility and opportunity to learn new skills,” says Melvin Tanaya, a co-founder of the Aussie brand.

“I can definitely say that it is not a normal or easy thing to do,” he acknowledges. But for Song for the Mute, it was an important step to take. “It doesn’t matter how good you are in marketing or packaging your product. If, in the end, your customers are disappointed due to the quality, it’s hard to regain their trust.”

Tanaya continues: “We have always been Australian-made since the brand’s inception in 2010. That was the only way we knew how to produce, and we learned that the quality of our garments is on par with those made overseas.” Why not showcase that?

“We no longer want ‘Made in China’ and ‘Made in Italy’. Because there’s good Italy and there’s bad Italy; the same with China. We believe the factory is much more important than the country”

Back in Canada, Lasry has been curious about the business of fashion for as long as he can remember. When he tells me he was “born into the world of manufacturing”, it isn’t much of an overstatement. His father worked in a denim factory for 30 years. And even as a kid, Lasry liked designing products, and co-founded a streetwear brand as a teenager.

“Every time, my biggest challenge was transforming one of my designs into a physical product,” he says. “The factory would do an awful job. I’d get back samples that left me feeling unexcited and uninspired. So, I realised if I ever wanted to make great products, I needed to shift my focus from design into engineering and manufacturing.

I was actually in the shower coming up with ideas and thought to myself, Shit, I know the mill where Supreme makes its hoodies, because one of my friends worked there,” he says. “So, I went to my desk, made a video [about it] and posted it before I went to bed.” The following morning the video had got half a million views.

“It wasn’t just about the views or the following,” insists Lasry. “I had just ended my clothing brand and was a year and a half out of university, feeling lost. I knew I couldn’t work in banking or anything like that. I was really trying to figure my shit out. The video taking off allowed me to talk about something I was passionate about. It gave me direction.” Shortly after, he took that trip to Japan.

Looking ahead, Lasry wants Glass Factory to become “the Airbnb of manufacturing”. It is a big, bold target. Even so, with all the buzz around corporate social responsibility and the spotlight on past greenwashing antics, he’s feeling hopeful the industry will embrace the platform.

“This whole thing isn’t about me,” he says. “I’m beginning with the premium apparel industry because it’s what I know best. But my plan is to make manufacturing more transparent across various industries across the world. Maybe it’s not achievable in my lifetime, but if Glass Factory can leave behind a meaningful legacy, then who knows what could happen?”