Becoming an Ethical Consumer

Fast fashion is a terrible thing. You may think it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to you. After all, why wouldn’t you? For the first time ever, you can go out and buy about 10 items of clothes for less than 100 pounds, dollars, or whatever currency you work in. Gone are the days when one item took months or even a year to save for, the days when that item would be treasured forever. Now, an item will be worn twice, maybe three times, and will either fall apart, no longer be in fashion, or you simply don’t want to wear it any more. So what do you do with it?  You will either leave it there in your wardrobe – each woman has at least 20 unworn items in her wardrobe! – or you might put it in the charity bag, or even throw it away. Simply because that item cost the equivalent of two hour’s work, you can throw it away without a thought! Well, I’m sorry to break it to you, but that item was made with blood. One US brand sells T shirts for $50 even though that shirt cost around $5 to make. The woman who made that shirt will be punished if she doesn’t make enough shirts in an hour. She will make 90 cents in that hour. Just think about what you are endorsing! Slave labour. This is not an exaggeration. The conditions these women are forced to work in are beyond your worst nightmare.

If I had my way, every shop would be required to have posters showing the conditions of the factories where their clothes are manufactured at the entrance to their store. How many people would refuse to enter? The fact is, many people simply are not aware of the true implications of fast fashion. We MUST spread the message, we MUST educate people!
To begin this education, I recommend you watch a documentary. The True Cost is a documentary made by Andrew Morgan along with fashion activist Livia Firth, People Tree founder Safia Minney and writer Lucy Siegle. It is widely available on Netflix, Amazon and iTunes or can be bought on DVD from documentary website. You will watch this documentary wide eyed in absolute horror and (if you are anything like me) will shed at least one tear!
Next, you should start a Twitter account if you do not already have one. This sounds strange, but actually, this is where you will learn the most. A few people to follow are:
• Livia Firth, a fashion activist and ethical designer who, while her personal tweets are not always about fashion, retweets many valuable articles about sustainable and ethical fashion. The wife of actor Colin Firth, Livia has made some very valuable inputs to the ethical world. Her 30 wears challenge challenges consumers not to buy an item of clothing unless they will wear it at least 30 times. Another challenge is the Green Carpet Challenge. Obviously as the wife of an acclaimed actor, red carpets are going to be a fairly prominent part of her life. But this challenge encourages celebrities to wear something ethical on the red carpet instead!
• Trusted Clothes, a site dedicated to ethical and sustainable fashion. Retweets many valuable articles and tips along with the many articles posted here on the blog.
• Tortoise and Lady Grey, a great site with a wonderful challenge: 20 days of sustainable fashion. Sign up and for 20 days you’ll get an email educating you, asking you questions and setting you challenges to complete, all on the journey to a sustainable wardrobe!
• Ecouterre, an online magazine focusing on the future of fashion. Ecouterre highlights some great articles which will help you on your journey!
After you have completed the first two steps, stop and think. How far do you want to go with this? Is this just something which doesn’t interest you much but makes you feel better about yourself? Are you passionate about this? What are you going to do about it?
While the ethical market is growing, the interest is small. Last year, there were just 3600 Google searches for “ethical fashion”, even though 3billion searches are made every day! If you are going to be committed to ethical fashion, then you should be prepared to spread awareness. You could volunteer to blog for Trusted Clothes.
The third step is to write down at least 3 things you will do about ethical fashion, then comment below and tell us.
The fourth step is to consider your wardrobe. Here are some steps to follow:
• Only buy what you need. Impulse buys are one of the top reasons for the 11 million tons of textile waste generated every year
• Only buy it if you’ll wear it 30 times. If you need a dress for that office party but you hate dresses, borrow from a friend, don’t buy something for your wardrobe to wear!
• Instead of throwing away, repurpose old clothing.
• Buy items for the whole year round. If that lovely dress will only be worn on the one day the sun comes out in the entire summer, don’t buy it!
• Buy good quality items, from ethical brands
                       
It’s a long journey, but take as long as you want! If, by the end of your life you still have 5 items from the high street in your wardrobe, it’s not a crime! But if you can honestly say you have tried to the best of your ability to become a more ethical consumer, you have succeeded.

About the Blog

                   
Last year, I became involved in the ethical, sustainable fashion revolution, a movement which began after the collapse of the Rana Plaza Factory in Bangladesh on 24th April, 2013.
As my knowledge has increased, I have been motivated to "spread the word", and to educate the general public about the unseen world behind our clothes.

I hope this blog will be a helpful tool for those interested in the topic. I plan to write about one post each week, and will consider topics suggested by my readers.
I would really appreciate suggestions for new posts, as well as feedback on the blog, and also any publicity you can give on social media etc.

Fast Fashion: An Introduction

                 
Every day, no matter where we are, fast fashion is thrown at us. We are bombarded with it from all angles; on the TV we see the latest “mini-season” at H&M; waiting for the bus, the bus shelter advert tells us “These jeans are the best you’ll ever buy!”; the millions of fast-fashion followers on social media are notified about “great deals” every hour of every day.
But are these “deals” really so great? That T-shirt you bought for $10 took over 2500 litres of water to make - that’s what we drink over 3 years! It was made by a woman in India, China or Bangladesh, who makes less than $70 each month - $2 a day. (It costs more than $250/month for a family of 3 to live in Dhaka, Bangladesh; $152 on rent, $38 on utilities such as electricity, heating and water, and $68 on food.) So, the woman who made your clothes works 14-16 hours every day, 7 days a week and is paid less than 1/3 of what she needs to survive. She was probably paid around 10 cents to make that T-shirt, yet if she wanted to buy it from a shop in Bangladesh she would have to pay the $10 you paid.
These statistics should shock even the most hard hearted, but there’s more: on 24th April, 2013, an 8 storey building in Rana Plaza, Bangladesh, collapsed, killing over 1100 people, over half of whom were women working in the clothing factory which was housed in the building along with a bank and shops. Just a day before the collapse, workers had reported cracks in the walls of the giant structure. The building was evacuated and warnings were issued to avoid using the building, but the owner of the building, Sohel Rana ignored these warnings and told media the building was safe. Workers were forced to continue work the next morning, threatened with a month’s loss of pay if they did not turn up for work, and over 3000 workers were inside the critically unstable building at the time of the collapse, their employers simply caring about the money they made from the exploitation of these vulnerable women.
While these statistics are astounding, what is disgusting is that the year following this disaster was the most profitable in the history of the fast fashion industry. Clearly, people were unmoved by the footage broadcast across the globe which showed bodies of women hardly visible from beneath mountains of rubble, the bodies of women who had died at their sewing machines making the clothes that you pay so little for. And I am among the people who aided this disaster. For I, just like so many others, assumed that this was just a one-off event. I had no interest in the debates, accusations and discussions or studies that followed, simply assuming in my naïveté that most clothes were made by wonderful machines across Europe and America. Assuming that sweatshops were uncommon, that any that did exist were governed by strict safety laws. I never imagined the world of the people behind the clothes that I was wearing.
                  
Life works in the strangest of ways. Here I was, an ordinary student buying cheap clothes on a budget, then suddenly I was at the bottom of a steep new learning curve. One day I was boasting about how I managed to buy 13 items of clothing for just £50, the next I discovered Livia Firth.  Her Instagram and Twitter feeds filled with comments about ethical and sustainable fashion. “What is this?” I found myself wondering. “Is this some new trend I’m missing out on?” And yes, in a way, it was!
The first step was to find out how bad the situation really was. Was everything really produced in sweatshops in third world countries? Had we really gone from producing 97% of our own clothes in Europe and America in the 1960s to just 3% today? So, I surveyed my wardrobe, with some truly shocking results. Of the 86 items – which in itself is shocking, as who needs 86 items of clothing when you can only wear 3 at once? – 22% were made in China, 9% in Bangladesh, 7% in Turkey, 6% in Sri Lanka, 5% in India, 4% in Cambodia, 2% in Indonesia, another 2% in Egypt and 1% in Vietnam, Tunisia, Romania and Moldova. Just 4% were made in the UK and 35% of the clothing was unaccounted for. Multiple brands are simply ashamed to admit where there clothes are made but refuse to do anything about it! Instead of trying better alternatives they refuse to face up to the facts and tell the public who made their clothes, and personally I find this abhorrent.
It shocked me to find how few clothes were made in a good or safe environment, and this was the beginning of my resolve. I would no longer buy clothes that were made cheaply and in poor conditions but instead would support ethical and sustainable brands. Any clothes I did buy were to be worn according to the “30 wears” rule. This is a rule I discovered very early in my path towards change. A challenge started by Livia Firth, who says “Every time you buy something, always think, ‘Will I wear it a minimum of 30 times?’ If the answer is yes, then buy it. But you’d be surprised how many times you say no.” Livia has worked both with Marks and Spencer and Erdem to produce sustainable fashion at affordable prices that looks great, and makes you feel good for supporting the environment and third world countries.
Sustainable fashion is “the responsible use of resources, low/no environmental impact and fairly treated workers. It does not pollute the environment, uses renewable resources and uses a ‘closed-circle' lifecycle.” This means items are produced from a certain material, used, recycled and then made into new materials – in a never ending loop! Ethical fashion is “the production of clothes according to labour and human rights”. This means clothes are made by workers in safe working conditions, who receive a fair wage. Brands who sell fashion like this are People Tree, Nomads Clothing, Mayamiko, Elborne Living and Nisolo Shoes. These brands work with artisans all over the world, keeping local industry alive with Fair Trade. What a contrast this is to the fast fashion industry where brands such as Topshop introduce over 400 new styles every week! The chemicals these brands use on your clothes can cause cancer and other diseases with the worst offenders being Calvin Klein, Levi’s and Zara. Items from these brands were tested and 88% Calvin Klein items, 82% Levi’s items and 70% Zara’s items contained traces of these chemicals! During the manufacture of these fast fashion products, hundreds of different chemicals are used. The River Ganges, which flows through Bangladesh and India, is the second most polluted river in the world. One billion litres of sewage and toxic waste enters this river every day, with chemicals such as Chromium-6 entering the drinking water of the 400million people dependent om the river. This toxic chemical attacks the liver causing liver cancer and jaundice.
Looking at these facts is it any wonder that the fashion industry is the second highest polluting industry in the world after oil? Every third world village where the fast fashion industry exists has experienced an outbreak of cancers, mental illnesses and birth defects. 70-80 children in every village have a disability. Companies are recommending new seeds to farmers, marketing them as “pest control “ seeds. In fact, these seeds require pesticides known as ecological narcotics. The more they are used, the more they are needed, and while the production increases for a short time after a few seasons the production begins to decrease rapidly due to the soil contamination caused by these pesticides. In the past 16 years, there have been 250,000 suicides of Indian farmers. That’s approximately one every thirty minutes!

“So, what am I supposed to do about this?” you’re asking. The answer is simple. Stop supporting fast fashion! I have stopped buying fast fashion, the things I own I have worn many times, and I never throw anything away. Unwanted clothing can be sold on through sites such as eBay, Vinted, or you could upcycle your items by making an old top into a waistcoat, or turn that old pair of jeans into some shorts for summer! You could even take your old trainers to a Nike store where they will be recycled for you! However, while charity shops are also a good idea, only 10% of items donated to charity are resold. The other 90% ends up in landfill or a developing country. This has ruined industry in countries such as Haiti, where there was a booming industry which has now all but disappearing due to the crate loads of unwanted clothes arriving every day.
                    
Obviously, fast fashion is not the best option. Yes, it may seem as if it keeps the cash in your pocket for longer, but the items you are buying are poor quality, and you will need to buy many to last you through the season.
And above all, you are wearing blood.

(First published on trustedclothes.com
Post edited before appearing on sefashioned.blogspot)