Reminder to avoid buying anything crochet new from big stores. Crochet (unlike knit) CANNOT be done by a machine and must be done by an actual human being. The person who made it was definitely not paid an appropriate amount for their labour. Most big stores use sweatshops anyway and I know it’s hard to completely avoid buying anything from a major store. But if those specific items don’t sell, we can send a message to companies that we don’t want items made fully by hand using slave labour
This summer, avoid any new crochet items. You don’t need THAT specific top that badly
Would like to add on to this though that big manufacturers LOVE to replicate the overall look of crochet with a machine knit
see this is an actual crochet piece:
this is a machine knit:
if you zoom in closely you can see that it’s not actually double sided the way real crochet is and the stitches are a bunch of tiny knit ‘V’s instead of the larger chain shape of crochet:
so basically while fast fashion still isn’t ethical, feel free to take a closer look at that cheap crochet piece that you’re interested in, bc it might be less bad than you thought, in that it probably isn’t actually crochet (though sometimes it is and absolutely do not buy that)
(also, alt text in images)
