With clothes, you can assume nothing. If you think you can pick out locally made clothes by looking for a certain price category, certain fabrics or the intricacy of a garment, you’ll quickly notice that there is no easy rule of thumb. South African made clothes are neither more expensive nor cheaper. Viscose/spandex products can be homemade or imported. You’ll find locally manufactured simple T-shirts as well as tailor-quality business suits.

So what is the reason that most clothes sold in RSA retail are imported?

Skills shortage? This argument doesn’t hold in the South African textile sector. South African seamstresses can do the same things as their counterparts overseas.

Fabric availability? This won’t make any difference as most fabric used in South African manufacturing today is imported. However, the lack of local value chains makes importing finished garments attractive for businesses, see the section on cotton below.

Production costs? As mentioned, this doesn’t show up in retail prices, but possibly it is more expensive to produce here and the selling price for RSA-made clothes gets cross-subsidised by the imports.

Outsourcing is the order of the day? Not all manufacture of local clothes is outsourced. Some South African retailers, like Foschini or PEP, actually own clothes manufacturing businesses. Others like Woolworths, say they are retailers, not manufacturers. But that seems to be a choice rather than a necessity: Woolworths has a controlling interest in the Australian clothes manufacturers Country Road and Trenery, both of which are very successful in the South African market.

What you can safely assume if you buy an imported garment is that the textile worker (that already mentioned seamstress) would have earned less than her South African counterpart. The minimum wage in Mauritius can be as low as R200 a week compared with South Africa’s R481 a week. There is no minimum wage in Bangladesh or the other Asian countries. Closer to home, Lesotho’s minimum wage is just over a 1/3 of South Africa’s. Before you start complaining about South Africa’s uncompetitively high wages please ask yourself if you would be prepared to work in a demanding full-time job for under R2,000 a month – and if you would manage to feed a family on that money. I wouldn’t want to do it and many Mauritians don’t either. See the section on EPZs here.