Once again the closet opens and the skeletons tumble out. Here are three of the most outwardly respectable high street stores — including one that often waves around its world-saving plan and another assumed to have got its supply chain in order following exposes of working conditions in the 1990s — connected to miserable Gurgaon garment factories.
None of the firms identified this time is a “value” retailer, but they too are in the grip of fast fashion — making on-trend designs mind-bogglingly cheap and getting them into their stores in days, rather than months. And the real cost continues to be paid by garment workers thousands of kilometers away.
Soon, London Fashion Week will signal to the fashion community that it’s time to focus on the new season. This is a quaint throwback. The fashion industry’s two seasons a year have been replaced in high street shops by 30 to 50 mini-seasons. A CMT (cut-make-trim) factory in India, Bangladesh or Cambodia must be hyper-responsive to cope with design changes from offices in Europe. A last-minute fax insisting that a button needs to be moved sends a poorly funded, badly managed factory into a panic. Third-world firms will never tell Western retail superpowers that an order is too difficult, so workers are simply told they must finish it.
Buyers for UK companies focus on keeping prices down and getting their Daisy Duke shorts into stores while the relevant celebrity is still wearing them. They also grapple with thousands of suppliers all over the world. A factory that might realistically be able to supply 20,000 pairs of jeans can suddenly be deluged by an order for 500,000. It will simply subcontract to factories of an ever-declining standard.
Attempting to uphold standards in this melee has traditionally meant a reliance on factory audits (where a representative visits and ticks safety and welfare boxes). This is thought as effective as the proverbial chocolate teapot.
The Ethical Trading Initiative, the voluntary industry body that all three companies involved here are members of, is also criticized by campaigners for being too placid.
“Ethical trade doesn’t mean that there’s a cast-iron guarantee that the person who made that T-shirt has been treated right. It’s about company behavior. It tells you they are working to improve,” initiative spokeswoman Julia Hawkins said.
Is this good enough? Not for poverty campaign group ActionAid, which thinks consumers should expect a little more.
“An essential part of any ethical trade has to be to ensure that workers are being paid a living wage. At a bare minimum, this should be enough for a worker to pay for food for her family and cover housing, education and health needs — Asian garment workers are currently being paid about half of what they need to do this,” it said.
However, Claire Hamer, a former mainstream fashion buyer credited with introducing Fairtrade fashion to Topshop, sees change on the horizon. Through her consultancy Ei8ht, she develops ethical supplies and has recently masterminded Asos Africa, a line for the online retailer produced by 24 tailors in a Kenyan cooperative.
“The future is behind the label and the story behind it, not just about the brands,” she said. “The smart fashion brands are beginning to design and buy out of these issues. I envisage a world where, when someone says ‘I love your top,’ you won’t just say, ‘Thanks, it’s from Topshop,’ you’ll take pride in knowing who made it. The value is not just in the brand, it’s in the people who made it and how it was made.”
There is clearly some way to go. When the fashion press covers ethics, it largely means whether catwalk models should eat more, rather than whether garment workers should eat at all.
It’s tempting to cast retailers as Dickensian ogres but fast fashion is driven by consumer appetites. We love fashion but we also dump 2 million tonnes of textile waste (mostly clothing) in landfill each year, which suggests we don’t value it. As consumers, we get the type of fashion retail we deserve and ask for. We need a new plan.
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