Window Display to Pay Tribute to Garment Workers

They have often labored in squalid conditions, sweating through long hours so others can look good while being honored. Now, beginning Sunday and lasting for a year, the workers in Los Angeles’ huge garment industry will be honored themselves with a window display downtown.

In an empty building that once housed the landmark Robinsons department store on 7th Street between Hope Street and Grand Avenue, a Los Angeles-based artists group will officially open the tribute during a ceremony that begins at 2 p.m. Sunday.

Nine windows that front 7th Street will pay homage to the previously unheralded workers with a exhibition titled “Hidden Labor: Uncovering Los Angeles’ Garment Industry.”

The mixed-media exhibitions, created by eight local artists from the Venice-based Common Threads Artists Group, depict various scenes of the history of garment workers in the United States.

The first window tells the story of Italian and Jewish immigrants working in the sweatshops of New York City, with references to the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire in which 146 workers lost their lives.

The next windows track the progression of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in Los Angeles from the depth of the Depression to the war years to the 1950s, when the “California look” developed.

One of the last displays tells the agonizing plight of dozens of Thai immigrants enslaved in an El Monte sweatshop. The owners of the shop were recently sentenced to several years in federal prisons.