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I wanted some new jeans, but in light of some horror stories I’d heard I wanted them to be ethical – but ethical fashion that's like the old joke about the world's shortest books (Italian War Heroes, Swiss Comedians, Interesting Belgians - clichés all). 'Ethical Fashion' really could be the shortest story in the world because I'm not sure it really exists, or if it does it’s keeping a damn low profile. There are ethical clothes of course - baggy, shapeless, beige t-shirts made in third world worker co-operatives from organic fairtrade cotton - but not proper catwalk, designer label type fashion.
 OK, there are pockets of conscience. Vegetarian Stella McCartney with her stand against fur and leather err… and then my mind goes blank. That’s not to say the fashion world is totally devoid of conscience. There is a lot of tireless work for AIDS and breast cancer charities, but when it comes to the real business of fashion, everything about it is fundamentally counter to current ethical concerns.
Fashion is an industry based on fuelling consumption for things which are defined by their built-in obsolescence not merely this-year/last-year, but this-season/last-season; on making people want things they don’t need and buy more than they can really afford; and on seducing us into believing that owning a material object can change our lives. It is certainly one of fashion’s ironies that while spending £100,000 on a single dress might seem the very apogee of decadence, it is at the very peak of the fashion mountain that you will find the most ethical employment conditions. The ‘petite mains’ working in Paris couture salons are treated very differently from the almost slave labour in some Asian clothing factories. The Parisian master crafts people are valued for their skills and the couture customer can and does pay the premium price for it.
It is at the other end of the market where the real horrors lurk. The current trend for cheaper and cheaper great clothes - which I confess I have been guilty of buying - marvellous fun as they are for the Western consumer, is inevitably linked to terrible conditions for the people who make them. Stores like Zara and H&M may be fantastic at bringing catwalk inspired collections [i.e. knock-offs] within weeks of them appearing in the magazines and at a price you know you can afford but if we’re not paying for it - then you can be sure someone else is. Sorry if I’ve just ruined the jolly weekend shopping spree you were looking forward to, but that is the top and bottom of it. If we pay less at the shop you can be certain that by the time that money from your bargain filters down to the poor sod that made the item they’re being paid a pittance and as for the conditions they’re making it in – well don’t even go there.
And it gets worse, before you even get on to the conditions in a Thai sports shoe factory and the problem of knowing which big brands really use the ethical labour they - or rather, their sub-contractors - claim, there are the environmental nightmares associated with the textile industry.
Take cotton - actually, don’t, because the world’s favourite ‘natural’ fibre is not, in fact, ‘pure and simple’ as we have grown up to believe. Lovely as it is to wear and sleep in; cotton is one of the most pest-prone of crops, meaning that to produce it cheaply in industrial quantities, enormous amounts of chemicals have to be thrown at it. About 150 grams of pesticides are used to cultivate the cotton for one T-shirt (that’s the equivalent of one cup, and it takes two and a half cups for a pair of jeans) so perhaps it’s not surprising that, according to a 1995 report a quarter of all the world’s insecticides are used each year to grow cotton.
And when you add in the various soil sterilisers, fumigants, herbicides and defoliants also used to grow this ‘natural’ fibre, we are talking about some of the most deadly chemicals in the world. According to the World Health Organisation, 20,000 people die each year in developing countries as a result of sprays used on non-organic cotton. In Benin, West Africa, twenty four people died as a direct result of poisoning from cotton pesticides in 2000, 11 of those twenty four were children.
And that’s just the agricultural part of the textile cycle. At least 8000 chemicals are used at the next stage of processing, to turn raw material into clothes, towels, bedding etc, and some of the substances involved are known to be harmful to human health and wildlife. How are feeling about your ‘pure’ cotton T-shirt now? As bad as me I hope. Of course, all that chemical business happens before the shirt gets on your back and, like so many eco nightmares that are happening somewhere else, it’s easy to block it out.
But I sense there is a growing sense of concern that the chemical toxicity associated with cotton production might not stop at the soil and unfortunate Third World labourers. It’s called the ‘nicotine patch’ effect, that having such a highly processed product next to our skin we may absorb residues - such as the formaldehyde used as a dye fixer and anti-wrinkle finisher in some countries - into our bloodstreams. These uncomfortable ideas are contributing to a growing market for organically farmed cotton and naturally processed fabrics of all kinds. It might seem cranky and alarmist now, but I am certain it will one day be as normal to expect an organic option in your clothing as it is in your veggies, or your face cream. |
