The city that makes your wardrobe
Tiruppur does not look like a place that clothes the world. It looks like heat and exhaust and the sound of cutting machines that start before dawn. The Tamil Nadu town produces roughly 90 percent of India's cotton knitwear exports and supplies garments to brands sold across Europe, the United States, and increasingly to Indian fast fashion labels chasing the same cheap-manufacturing logic. The workers inside those units are mostly women. Many migrated from villages in the Nilgiris or from districts further north, following the promise of steady wages. What they found was work, relentless, underpaid, and almost entirely invisible to the person who eventually wears the finished piece.
