The Taylor Swift Crochet Dress.

Let’s take a look at the ethics of the Taylor Swift crochet dress. I’ve made mine. And published my version of the pattern. All over, many people are crocheting dresses, with great excitement. It’s wonderful to see crochet get a popularity boost. But perhaps there are also worrying issues in our fashion industries today that the popularity of this dress helps expose.

Retail price of the Taylor Swift Dress

So. Taylor Swift bought a dress. And was seen wearing it. Nothing wrong with that. Actually, it makes me happy to see a celebrity shopping and wearing items that are within many peoples reach. At €116 (or $124, or £98) this dress is expensive to the average person, but possibly achievable. Maybe by saving a little, or cutting from the budget elsewhere. A nurse or a teacher could buy this.

Taylor could, if she wanted, dress exclusively in things you and I could never afford. So the first thing I love about this dress is that many of her fans can make or buy one for themselves. It’s great when celebrities promote a lifestyle that is achievable. No one benefits when half the world are made to feel excluded, or presented with impossible goals.

So what’s wrong with the price of the crochet dress?

I recently crocheted a new sample of my Enniskerry Garden Cardigan. The plan was to show it off with my own pictures, as I only had pictures taken by the magazine.

To get my pattern looking its best, I wanted a yarn that would look well, last well, and not damage the environment. (and work to gauge for the pattern, obviously) My choice was Kremke Soul Wool Morning Salutation. It’s true I could have found a cheaper yarn. But I also could have found many more expensive ones. At €4.95, this yarn is of average price, with good environmental credentials for the money.

This yarn is made from cotton which comes from inside the EU, so I can be reasonably sure there was no child labour or slave labour involved. And Lyocell, a synthetic plant based fibre which is what mades it feel so delicious to the hands. Such fibre can be good or bad, depending on how and where it’s made. The manufacturer guarantee that all the wood for the Lyocell comes from managed forestry.

And it has to be said, it feels lovely flowing over the hands when working with it. Its highly enjoyable to crochet with, and I see the as very important.

So, what did I spend on yarn?

Answer: €80. The cardigan cost me €80 to create in money from my bank account.

The finished dress that has become so famous cost €116. While my yarn cost €80. That only leaves €36 for labour, shipping, overheads, retailer mark up, and so on. Gosh!

Could I have bought less expensive yarn?

When I made my Taylor Swift dress, I used yarn from my stash, and didn’t buy any. I used 3 different brands of yarn, in fact. The least expensive of these was Drops Paris. (I also used some Hobbii Rainbow 8/8 and some Performance Linen Touch.) The total quantities for the dress are between 19 and 33 balls of yarn. If the dress was made in a size Large it could cost €30 (24 balls at €1.25 each)

Also, for my Enniskerry Garden Cardigan, Yes, I could have bought less expensive yarn, but not by much. If budget was my only concern, I could possibly have bought yarn for half the price, and spent €40, rather than €80. The final garment would not have felt nearly so nice on the skin, and would have been much less sustainable.

Wholesale yarn is not so expensive

Another consideration is that, as a private individual, I bought my yarn retail. I bought mine from This is Knit. The shop will have bought it from the manufacturer. Yarn is sold wholesale at 45% or 50% of the retail cost. So I can assume that This Is Knit paid about €40 for the yarn they sold to me for €80. But let’s not forget, they had to buy in bulk, store the yarn, hire staff and pay overheads as well as a bunch of other costs.

However, if I wanted to set up a company selling these cardigans, I could potentially buy the yarn wholesale. Maybe I could even find less expensive options by shopping for huge cones of yarn that are sold to manufacturers, rather than small balls sold for the home crafter. But, to do that, let’s not forget, I would need acesss to a warehouse and premises, all the light and heat to run it, and giant sums of money up front. (When I used to sell craft kits at market stalls I used to buy a small amount of yarn wholesale, and I can assure you, the minimum order quantities from most companies are gigantic. Think remortgaging your house to make your first wholesale purchase)

If you take all that into consideration, it starts to look possible that a company could manufacture a crochet dress for €15 – €30 worth of yarn, if they used a basic plant based yarn.

What the Taylor Swift Crochet dress was made from

This company didn’t. Looking at the details of the dress, it turns out it is 100% acrylic. I would not pay over 100 quid for something made from acrylic. To be honest, I wouldn’t pay anything for something made from acrylic. First of all, it conducts static electricity, so it’s very harsh on the skin. It’s also neither warming not cooling. When it’s hot, it will make you sweat and be sticky. It won’t warm you up when it’s cold, either. And it’s killing the planet.

So, in fact, the manufacturers could have paid only a couple of quid per dress for the yarn. But they did so by using a yarn that is massively destructive to the environment, will wear out quickly, and not do the wearer much good either. It’s not healthy to wear acrylic.

My first big issue with this dress therefore, is what it is made from. Our planet deserves better, we deserve better.

Let’s talk Labour. Who crocheted the Taylor Swift dress?

When I crocheted the Enniskerry Garden Cardigan I spent about 20-25 hours making it. I made it myself, and didn’t need to pay myself. However, I do value my own labour. It forms part of the emotional value I put on the things I make for myself, or give as gifts.

My best guesstimate is that the cardigan took me about 20-25 hours to make. When I then made my version of the Taylor Swift crochet dress. It also took me 3 days to make. Probably 21 hours in total. How much is that worth? By minimum wage standards, it’s €254.

So in my pretend company making these dresses, I am paying as little as possible for yarn. Now I need to hire staff to crochet them, and pay then for 20 hours of work per dress. 20 hours of work at minimum wage in Ireland where I live is €254.

But my company would also need to pay employers PRSI contributions. And possibly Vat.

Another question I would ask is who would sell the dresses. My company could sell them on line, but then I also need to hire a sales team. Or I could sell wholesale. Which means the boutique who buys them will sell at twice what they paid.

Taking all those figures into account, if I was selling my Enniskerry Garden Cardigan through a small boutique, that very same one in the pictures, I would expect its price tag to be in the region of €800 – €900. Gosh. Again, gosh.

How could I save on these high labour costs for the Taylor Swift crochet dress?

The easiest way to reduce costs making this dress are to move to somewhere that its possible to exploit staff to a greater extent that inside the EU.

However, the original Taylor Swift crochet dress was manufactured in China. Conditions for garment workers in China are notoriously among the worst in the world, with lowest pay.

Staff working on making these dresses will have been paid a flat wage at the end of the month amounting to a few pence per day. They will have been forced to work 7 days a week for possibly up to 16 hours a day, with only 1 day off a month. Slave labour conditions are sadly still rampant around the world. And fast fashion is totally dependant on them.

We need to do better.

Let’s talk size and shape of the Taylor Swift crochet dress.

So the original Taylor Swift crochet dress was sold at the price it was sold at, because it was made from terrible yarn, by seriously exploited workers in terrible conditions who were not paid fairly for their crochet skills.

But there is one more significant point I believe is important, and that is the impact of fast fashion garments like this on our overall well being. It all starts with the size and shape of the dress. Let’s take a look…

The original dress is only available from a 30 to a 41 inch chest. That’s not much range of sizing. 50% of women in the UK have a 42 inch chest or above. So less than half of all women (in western, English speaking countries, a main market for this dress) can actually fit into it. Taylor Swift has a song about feeling like everyone else is a ‘Sexy baby’ while you are an ‘Ogre in the hill’. The manufacturers of this dress obviously didn’t worry about making more than half of women feel like lumbering Ogers on a hill when they set these sizes, as they excluded half of all women from being able to buy one.

True style, I believe, allows EVERYBODY to have that moment of feeling like they are beautiful (and sexy too, if that’s what they want to feel like). It does not tell half the population that they are ‘too big’ to wear normal clothes.

Shape and style of the dress

In other ways, too, this dress is a perfect example of ‘fast fashion’ and all that’s wrong with it, despite being hand made. (All clothes are hand made, after all. If you sew a dress with the help of a sewing machine, its still a hand made dress.)

The dress has no pockets. (Although my pattern does!) Pockets are political! Men’s clothes never lack pockets.

It has no lining. And it’s see-through. So this lack of lining is kind of an issue. Want to wear this dress? The retailers point you towards expensive ‘nude underwear’. ‘Buy more, buy more, buy more stuff’ capitalism yells at us, as always. See, cheap clothes don’t nessesarily save us any money, and spending more on an individual garment can be a financially sensible thing to do.

To be fair, by comparison, my patterns don’t have linings either. My cardigan is designed as an over garment. And my version of the Taylor Swift dress, I would simply style over leggings and a tank top. I wrote a tutorial to empower people to make their own. if I was designing a crochet dress from scratch I would have either used a less see-through stitch, or included option instructions to make a fabric lining.

And finally the shape. It’s 4 rectangles. A child can (and maybe did) make it. And that’s one of the wonderful things about it in some ways. Don’t yet know how to crochet? You don’t need any experience. This is a pattern suitable for a beginner. There is no complex shaping.

Why have shaping?

But on the other hand, shaping in garments has its purpose. A finished item sold in a shop, in my opinion, should have some shaping. Well shaped garments that fit your shoulders, bust and hips last longer. They fit better. They look better on you, and therefore boost your self esteem.

Baggy-bag garments that won’t sit in place force you to stop and think about your clothes all day long. To be constantly adjusting them.

Fast fashion very deliberately and intentionally designs garments so you get a boost of dopamine buying them, but feel awful wearing them – so you go and buy more. Its sad to see crochet items fall into that trap.

So, what’s the solution to all these problems with the Taylor Swift Crochet Dress?

Should I just not wear one? No! Love the moment, love the trend, love yourself, do what makes you happy! Wear the dress!

But just:

Make it yourself (My pattern is here to help you, after all)

Make it with plenty of ease so it fits and drapes beautifully on you, whatever your size.

Make it with adaptions and adjustments to suit you and your lifestyle. Add pockets. Add lining. Add a belt. Add length (or take length off). Add fancy edges and frills. Make it personal. Make it playful. Make it joyous. But for heavens sake, please, make it, don’t buy it.

And when your Taylor Swift dress is made, you might like to make my Cailyn Henley pullover, which is a free pattern for all newsletter subscribers. Sign up here! Get discounts on my patterns, be the first to hear about new free patterns, and get all the up to date knitting and crochet tips and tricks straight to your in box.