All Your Apparel Needs
Here in Oxford the only people who seem to buy Oxford University sweatshirts are the armies of tourists who throng the city centre. (Students who play for university sports teams often advertise that fact on the clothes they wear, and College scarves are, of course, another way of making an — in this case slightly more discreet, in a twisted, British sort of way — institutional identification.)
In America, things are completely different, and students there are unreasonably fond of ugly sweatshirts with the campus name emblazoned across the front. The ground floor of the Harvard Coop sold little else, and its monthly bills had odd slogans on them like, “The Coop — For All Your Insignia Needs”, which always seemed to me a little preposterous.
Still, Americans like their insignia, and Harvard kids like theirs, and so I was very pleased to learn today that after holding out for five years, Harvard has agreed to join the Workers’ Rights Consortium, the only properly independent monitoring organisation which keeps tabs on the factory and labour conditions under which university clothing, etc., is produced.
That’s good news.