Ibrahim Shebani described garment tags in Istanbul that carried a hidden message from the workers who made them (EP 17).
Inside certain garments produced in Istanbul, workers had sewn tags that read: "This was produced by me, but I wasn't paid for it." The tags were not visible from outside. They were hidden inside the clothing — small acts of protest embedded in the product itself. A consumer would only find them if they looked carefully at the internal labels.
Ibrahim used the image to anchor his critique of fast fashion. The price on a garment's retail tag — the one the customer sees — bears no relationship to what the person who made it was paid. The Istanbul tags made this gap visible in the most direct way possible: the worker's own words, sewn into the seam.
He connected this to his philosophy behind "Born in Exile." His brand was built on the premise that clothing should cost what it costs to make properly — with fair wages, quality materials, and time. The fast fashion model inverts this: the goal is to minimise production cost and maximise retail margin. The worker disappears.
The unpaid tag sits alongside other moments in Damiri where guests described systems that render people invisible. Osama Alfitory (EP 10) described the fixer's role — essential to journalism, uncredited, dangerous. The garment worker and the fixer share a structural position: they do the work that makes the visible product possible, and their names never appear.