THE woman who helped Sir Philip Green make his billions from Topshop is to work unpaid for Oxfam, turning some of its charity clothes stores into a fashion chain for ethically conscious shoppers.

Jane Shepherdson, who has attacked the high street trend towards “cheap, cheap” clothes for exploiting the developing world, is in talks to take on an advisory role at the charity.

Oxfam wants Shepherdson to change its image as seller of cast-offs to poor students and middle-aged rummagers. The charity also wants to target the booming market of well-off consumers who have a conscience about how products are made.

Details of Shepherdson’s “ethical clothes” range have not yet been worked out, but they are likely to pay heed to the working conditions in which they are produced and to green factors.

Shepherdson, 43, whose job is likely to begin next month, said she was planning initiatives such as the use of organic cotton: “It is also about sustainable fashion – if you buy from Oxfam you are recycling. That message gets lost sometimes.”

She is a longstanding supporter of Oxfam and was approached about the role by David McCullough, its director of trading. McCullough once worked at Burton, a company now owned by Green.

Shepherdson resigned last October from her job as Topshop’s brand director soon after Green employed Kate Moss, the model, to design a range of budget fashion items.

Since then Shepherdson has spoken in forthright terms against the trend on the high street to sell ever-cheaper clothes bought from the developing world. She argued that consumers were finding it “a bit boring” to open their wardrobes and find them full of “cheap rubbish”. She warned that if clothes were too cheap, “someone, somewhere down the line is paying”.

The comments were interpreted as an attack on Green, but Shepherdson said this weekend: “People are trying to paint it as though Topshop was this dreadful fashion retailer. But we took corporate social responsibility very seriously.”

Shepherdson has made her first moves into ethical retail with a part-time role as product adviser and board member with People Tree, a fashion label based in Japan which offers saris made from recycled material, uses organic cotton and ships all its goods by sea to save on carbon emissions.

Ethically conscious fashion has become increasingly big business, with companies such as Marks & Spencer and New Look experimenting with organic clothing ranges. Fairtrade’s products, which guarantee to pay farmers in poor countries a fair price for their produce, have moved beyond its original priorities of chocolate, coffee and bananas.

Last year sales of Fairtrade cotton soared by more than 3,000% and M&S launched a 67-item range of Fairtrade clothes in February. Sainsbury became the first supermarket to launch a similar range in its spring collection.

Oxfam, which was one of the pioneers of ethical shopping 40 years ago, is now trying to make up for lost ground.

McCullough said: “We were one of the people who pioneered the principles of fair trading shopping 40 years ago but we have forgotten to tell people how central we are to the whole ethical debate. When we sell products, the money doesn’t go to the shareholders of the company, it goes to fight poverty.”

Oxfam has a network of 750 shops across Britain staffed by 21,000 volunteers. In the last financial year, it sold goods worth £80m and made £25m profit which went into its antipoverty programmes.

All the charity’s clothes come from donations – either cast-offs, secondhand items or surplus new ones. About 15% of products are bought from west Africa, India, Bangladesh and other countries where it works.

“There is a disconnect at the moment between the public perception of Oxfam shops and the reality and people who strongly support the Oxfam cause and shopping in our stores,” said McCullough.

In the next few weeks Oxfam will launch an advertising campaign for its 123 bookstores, which sell 13m books each year, making it the biggest seller of secondhand books in Europe.

Additional reporting: Will Iredale

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