Winds of Change – How Ethical Fashion Blew In From the East

Fashion. It’s been the most influential, most lucrative market in the world for more than 100 years. It dictates what we wear; what we look like; and, ultimately, who makes money out of our desire to conform to the latest trends. Traditionally, fashion has been rich hunting grounds for the unethical, long employing Third World labourers to produce garments for virtually nothing – garments that are then sold for hundreds, even thousands of pounds on high street clothes racks. Morality has finally caught up with trendiness – ethical fashion is kicking back with a vengeance.

Anyone who has ever been to Southeast Asia will have seen the rows and rows of tailors’ shops, where huge fashion house label goods are churned out for minuscule wages. A person can even buy those label clothes, right there, for less than the price of a UK cup of coffee. That’s some pretty powerful evidence for exactly how much cash is being squeezed out of these workers by the famously faceless fat cats from the clothing companies. Naturally enough, we’ve all known about this since the year dot – we just chose to ignore it. Until some nameless and enterprising soul realised they could make the ethics of fashion, rather than the fashion itself, trendy – birthing ethical fashion in the process, and rudely ripping the rug out from under all those fat cat feet. You can still hear them landing, hefty thuds all over the City marking yet another unscrupulous clothing company whose customer base has decided they’d rather pay someone else to not rip off an alley full of seamstresses.

Well, good. It’s about time some of these “money talks” types got a taste of their own medicine. Question is, is moral fashion really moral – or just another way of getting people to spend their money? Ultimately, it’s probably a bit of both – good intentions rubbing shoulders with the usual profit hungry corporations. Certainly, the big wig clothing companies are scrambling hard to get on the band wagon, pumping out summer lines that are clearly inspired by the genuine article.

Genuine article – now that’s a key phrase. Really ethical fashion is sourced from the people who were being ripped off. It’s imported and sold in such a way that these people get a decent cut of the profits. The big clothing companies might be pushing out clothes that look like the ethical stuff genuinely concerned people (like UK web site SaffronWinds) are bringing in – but they aren’t the real deal. They can’t be, because the big clothing companies won’t pay the profit shares that ethical trading demand.

So – anyone who wants to make a real statement, be warned. That statement cannot be made by going into the nearest high street store and buying something that looks vaguely Asian. Rather the alternative is to find a real ethical fashion company (like the aforementioned SaffronWinds). Or risk feeding the fat cat mouths, just like before.