> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://abagofstories.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Who Made Your Bag? 36 Portraits for Workers’ Day - URL: https://abagofstories.com/who-made-your-bag-36-portraits-for-workers-day/ - Published: 2026-07-16T14:46:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-07-26T16:20:15.000Z - Description: 36 portrait posters featuring the people who make AFAR bags in Addis Ababa. Inspired by a question raised by Fashion Revolution, the project brings the viewer inside the workshop: who stands behind the objects we use every day? - Author: Giulia Zhang - Tags: Local Futures, Hands & Materials, Ethiopia In 2013, after the collapse of Rana Plaza in Bangladesh, Fashion Revolution began asking a question that moved through the fashion industry with unusual force: **Who made my clothes?** Founded by Carry Somers and Orsola de Castro, the movement has since brought together citizens, workers, brands, researchers, and policymakers calling for a fashion industry that is safer, cleaner, fairer, and more accountable. **The question worked because it was simple.** A shirt has a label. A dress has a price. A pair of trousers has a brand, a size, and a barcode. By the time these objects reach a shop, the people who cut the fabric, guided the seams, checked the finish, and prepared them for shipment have often disappeared from view. Fashion Revolution turned that absence into a public question. It asked consumers to look beyond the finished surface. It asked companies to explain where their products come from, who makes them, and under what conditions. It argued that transparency should be an ordinary responsibility rather than an occasional gesture. For Workers’ Day 2026, AFAR and Ayzoh! carried that question into the workshop in Addis Ababa. **Who made your bag?** ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/07/who-made-my-bags-0001.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/07/who-made-my-bags-0002.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/07/who-made-my-bags-0003.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/07/who-made-my-bags-0004.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/07/who-made-my-bags-0005.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/07/who-made-my-bags-0006.jpg) ## Thirty-Six Faces The answer begins with portraits. Thirty-six people. Thirty-six names. Thirty-six individuals photographed with the objects their work helps bring into the world. Their names appear beneath the AFAR logo, in the place where a brand might usually leave only its own mark. Selam. Wube. Lemlem. Worku. Abeba. Tadele. Ephrem. Fasil. Abaynesh. Each name marks a presence. Ayzoh! made the portraits inside AFAR’s workshop, where canvas, leather, thread, printed fabrics, sewing machines, cutting tables, buckles, and handles become finished bags. A hand aligns a piece of fabric. Another steadies a seam. Someone checks an edge, adjusts a strap, follows the rhythm of a machine, lifts the bag, turns it, and looks again. Each finished object carries a sequence of decisions: the cut of the canvas, the pressure of a hand-printed pattern, the tension of a stitch, the placement of a handle, the correction of a small imperfection before the bag leaves the table. A bag appears simple when it is finished. It waits on a shelf, rests beside a chair, hangs from a shoulder, crosses a city, passes through an airport, and returns home marked by dust, rain, sunlight, and use. Inside the workshop, that apparent simplicity is constructed slowly. It comes from material, judgment, correction, skill, and time. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/07/who-made-my-bags-0007.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/07/who-made-my-bags-0008.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/07/who-made-my-bags-0009.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/07/who-made-my-bags-0010.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/07/who-made-my-bags-0011.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/07/who-made-my-bags-0012.jpg) ## The Portrait as Information The people in these photographs are not asked to perform poverty, virtue, or gratitude. They stand with the bags they make and look back at the camera. Some hold the object close to the body. Some carry it across a shoulder. Some smile openly; others remain quieter. No single expression is asked to represent the entire workshop. The repeated background and graphic structure create a shared visual language, but the people remain distinct. Posture changes. Distance changes. The relationship between body and object changes. A portrait can do something a supply-chain diagram cannot. It can slow the eye. It can keep the viewer with one person at a time. The bag remains visible, but it does not replace the person. The brand is present, but it does not occupy the whole frame. The information is direct: this object has a human origin. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/07/who-made-my-bags-0013.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/07/who-made-my-bags-0014.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/07/who-made-my-bags-0015.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/07/who-made-my-bags-0016.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/07/who-made-my-bags-0017.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/07/who-made-my-bags-0018.jpg) ## From Clothes to Bags “Who made my clothes?” became one of contemporary fashion’s clearest questions because it interrupted the distance between consumption and labor. AFAR asks the same question through another object. A bag has a particular intimacy. It holds what a person decides to carry: keys, documents, books, a camera, a passport, a phone, a scarf, a notebook, and the small disorder of daily life. It travels close to the body. It touches the ground. It opens and closes many times a day. Its surface changes according to where it has been and how it has been used. The people who make it rarely travel with it. Their work does. Transparency begins when an object can lead back to the place where it was made, and that place can lead back to the people who work there. It begins when production is understood as a relationship rather than a hidden stage behind the finished product. Who cut the canvas? Who prepared the pattern? Who printed the fabric? Who stitched the seams? Who attached the handles? Who checked the bag before it left Addis Ababa? The answer cannot be reduced to one person. A bag is a collective object. It carries the work of many hands, and those hands belong to people with names, histories, families, skills, fatigue, humor, worries, and pride. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/07/who-made-my-bags-0019.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/07/who-made-my-bags-0020.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/07/who-made-my-bags-0021.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/07/who-made-my-bags-0022.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/07/who-made-my-bags-0023.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/07/who-made-my-bags-0024.jpg) ## Names and Faces The series keeps each person’s name visible without asking it to become a symbol or an explanation. A name is already enough. It marks presence. It resists the anonymous language of supply chains, where people are often described as labor, workforce, capacity, cost, or risk. These terms may belong to reports and production plans, but they cannot contain a life. They cannot describe how someone learned a skill, how knowledge moves between colleagues, or how a person recognizes when a seam is strong enough before any test confirms it. The portraits do not claim to tell each person’s entire story. They do something smaller and more exact: they refuse disappearance. One face at a time, the series asks the viewer to remain with the person behind the object. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/07/who-made-my-bags-0025.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/07/who-made-my-bags-0026.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/07/who-made-my-bags-0027.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/07/who-made-my-bags-0028.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/07/who-made-my-bags-0029.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/07/who-made-my-bags-0030.jpg) ## Transparency and Responsibility Fashion Revolution’s work has always pointed toward systems rather than isolated gestures. Its call for transparency is also a call for responsibility. Consumers, brands, institutions, producers, and policymakers belong to the same chain, although they do not hold equal power within it. For a company, transparency begins with ordinary clarity. Where is the work done? Who does it? Which materials enter the workshop? Which skills are required? How is value distributed? What kind of workplace makes the finished object possible? These are practical questions. They also prevent the people inside the story from being reduced to evidence for an ethical claim. The portraits are not a campaign of charity. They are a record of work. They show people as part of a productive system, with competence, knowledge, and agency. The photographs recognize labor without romanticizing it. They keep attention close to the material realities of production: the table, the machine, the printed fabric, the leather edge, the hand correcting what another eye might miss. Ethical language becomes weak when it floats above these realities. It gains meaning when it remains accountable to them. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/07/who-made-my-bags-0031.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/07/who-made-my-bags-0032.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/07/who-made-my-bags-0033.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/07/who-made-my-bags-0034.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/07/who-made-my-bags-0035.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/07/who-made-my-bags-0036.jpg) ## A Bag Is Never Anonymous When a bag appears in a shop or on a website, it seems complete. Its materials, dimensions, colors, and functions can be described in a few lines. The portrait restores what the product description tends to leave outside the frame. Behind each AFAR bag is a workshop in Addis Ababa. There are materials selected, cut, printed, stitched, assembled, reinforced, and checked. There are people who know how to make an object strong enough for travel and practical enough for daily life. There is a rhythm of work that cannot be seen in the finished bag, but remains inside it. Fashion Revolution gave the fashion world a question that remains useful because it cannot be exhausted. Who made my clothes? Who made my shoes? Who made my bag? Who made the things I carry, wear, use, and eventually replace? The answer developed by AFAR and Ayzoh! begins here, with 36 portraits. Thirty-six names. Thirty-six faces. Thirty-six people whose work travels farther than they may ever know.