O lado de fora e o lado avesso da camiseta : tecnologia, mundo do trabalho e processos comunicacionais

Abstract

The T-shirt is a garment of mass consumption on a worldwide scale, due to the conditions of production today spread on a global scale and at a low cost, making part of the everyday lives, since the twentieth century, of millions of people worldwide. The garment, is produced in the well-know T-shaped, a standard established of technical reproduction that allowed the T-shirt to become a product part of the globalized culture that comes from the movement of global flow of information processes. In an interdisciplinary perspective, the research is built on the interface between fashion studies, communication and work sociology, including bibliographic and field research in small garment factories in Cuiabá (Mato Grosso, Brazil). The research topics of the following issues are: the technological transformations in the textile industry that allowed the emergence and the constant structural changes of the T-shirt as a textile product; the precariousness of the labor market in the garment sector, which demanded reinventions in the production practices (the reverse side of the T-shirt); and the different stamping and customization process that characterize the communication and subjective dimension of the Tshirt’s uses in everyday life (the outside of the T-shirt). Between economic production and social uses, it is pointed the characterization of the T-shirt as a product of a technological culture historically established in the textile sector, whose transformations depend on the garment sector’s production modes and the different uses that make up the imaginary of fashion in everyday life.