There was a time when you used to be able to purge your shopping guilt by regularly dumping, sorry, selflessly donating, cast-offs to the local charity shop. But at the start of this year, even that particular path to a clear conscience was being threatened with nefarious blockades. Pinned to the stock room of the Notting Hill Gate branch of Oxfam, for example, a sign announced, in none too apologetic tones, that it could no longer accept baby clothes unless they were new.

Notting Hill – well, what do you expect? But now Oxfam in general has let it be known that it’s not crazy about your Tesco and Primark rejects either. Leaving aside the moral contradictions of donating something that may have been produced by underpaid workers to an organisation that aims to help underpaid workers, you can see Oxfam’s point.

Say you bought said find in a supermarket for £3. And let’s assume, for politeness’ sake, that you wore it just the once. On the assumption that most clothes devalue by 50 per cent the moment you take them out of the bag, and by another 50 per cent once they’ve been worn, shoved in the back of the wardrobe, slammed into a bin liner and left to fester for a few seasons, the most Oxfam could charge would be 75p. That’s less than a packet of Christmas cards, yet it takes up considerably more space. Anyone can see that’s not a great way to run a business.

If Oxfam is raising its game, and with Jane Shepherdson, the woman who transformed Topshop from a shlocky chain to a must-have fashion destination, on board, could this fundamentally change the way we shop?

One thing’s for sure: we shop to feel good, yet the bargain-hunt frenzy is starting to feel increasingly grubby, even without the unedifying scenes at Primark’s Oxford Street opening earlier this year. Shepherdson has said that a lot of what’s on the high street is too cheap, and that “where something’s too cheap, someone, somewhere along the line is paying”. We all know she’s right, so she has a deep reservoir of guilt to draw on. But maybe guilt is part of the cheap-fix equation.

There is a business model here, of sorts. Marks & Spencer, winner of the large fashion retailer category in the RSPCA’s increasingly prestigious Good Business Awards earlier this month, has proved that in the right package – value for money, good design – the public would like its purchases to be ethical, environmentally responsible and considerate of animal welfare.

Meanwhile, the winner of the RSPCA’s fashion retailer award, Wildlifeworks (www.wildlifeworks.co.uk), has the most imaginative programme of any ethical clothing range I’ve seen. With an 80,000-acre wildlife sanctuary at Rukinga in Kenya, the company employs one keeper for every person making its clothes: the more clothes it sells, the more keepers it can employ. Profits are ploughed back into local projects, such as schools, so every piece of clothing bought has a direct, positive impact on someone’s life. Actually more than one life because the best thing, as far as the consumer is concerned, is that the clothes are fashionable and well designed. I think Jane Shepherdson just got her cue.

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