Would you pay more
for clothes if they were manufactured ethically i.e. produced in a factory with
fair working conditions and wages? What would ethical shopping look like to
you?
Before answering,
look at a garment that you recently purchased and find out the brand and where
it was made. Take a picture and tweet it with the info (or post it in the
comments section below).
Two weeks ago, KQED
Do Now examined the human cost of making clothing cheaply, stating that U.S.
fashion companies design their merchandise in the United States and then
outsource the labor in countries like Bangladesh where workers are paid very
little to sew the garments. Has the tragedy in Bangladesh changed our thinking?
Have we made the connection between the cost of clothes and the conditions of
these factories? Are we ready to acknowledge the human costs of this relentless
fashion treadmill and shop ethically? If workers are to be paid a living wage,
would we be prepared to pay more for clothes?
Take a look at the
label on your latest bargain, those trendy, cheap items from stores such as
H&M, Esprit, Lee, Wrangler, Nike, J.C. Penney and Wal-Mart. Where were
these clothes made?
In her book
Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, journalist Elizabeth L.
Cline describes buying “seven pairs of $7 shoes” at Kmart and admits to being a
“reformed fast-fashion junkie. She writes “because of low prices, chasing
trends is now a mass activity, accessible to anyone with a few bucks to spare.”
Fashion trends dangle the constant lure of display and self branding in front
of us and the drive to keep up becomes relentless. Quality is not the issue,
but the fear of losing face in the social mirror.
There is now an
“ethical fashion” movement and clothing companies like H&M, for example,
has a “Conscious Collection.” American Apparel and Fair Trade Fashion offer
natural, organic cotton or handmade clothing and sweatshop free production. Is
then organic and locally produced clothing a way of shopping ethically? Does it
also become a marketing strategy?
Another option is
to follow Cline’s advice to “make, alter and mend” by which she means buying
recycled clothes and taking care of the clothes we have, rather than discarding
clothing on a whim because they are cheap and easily replaceable when the
fashion moves on.
This could be a
sustainable solution to the damage to the environment of endless stuff, which
is disposable and easily replaced by yet more and cheaper versions of the same.
But is it a choice we are ready to make?
No comments:
Post a Comment