The fair-trade banana has become a staple in the well-meaning fruit bowl of life. Sales of fair-trade coffee are booming in Starbucks, and rumour has it that Coldplay's Chris Martin is shortly to take delivery of a fairly traded 4x4, one manufactured by well-fed, happy Germans earning way beyond the minimum wage.

But this is a fashion page, and that, I'm afraid, is where it gets tricky. Because while fair-trade fashion is not a complete oxymoron, it is not exactly a natural marriage either. However, hot on the heels of National Fair-Trade Fortnight in February and Cornwall's Unilateral Fair-Trade Epoch some time soon (I made that up, but it's actually quite a good idea), the Fairtrade mark has just celebrated World Fair Trade Day. Passed you by? Me, too. So it is only right that we inform ourselves as to what fair trade is before we next visit the shops.

Not that I am recommending that you buy something worthy out of guilt. For guilt, as I hope we all agree, is the very worst motive for partaking in any sort of retail activity. It is only through not being bought out of guilt that eco and fairtrade set-ups discover what we really want, especially if you follow your rejection with a comment on their websites. Call it tough love.

And they are improving. Honestly. In the past you looked. You pondered. You thought: “What a nice idea, I really must support it.” Then you went to H&M.

But things are changing, thanks to some serious hard work and soul-searching. “We are constantly working on ways to keep our customers engaged,” says Sim Scavazza, of adili.com, which describes itself as “a sort of ethical department store” (it has cute fair-trade trousers, wrap miniskirts and necklaces, by the way).

“We change the home page weekly, as you would a shop window, and are adding an entire section on news and features. And there's not a hemp dress in sight. We know that the demand is there. The high street is taking note and London Fashion Week has its own eco-brand section. It just hasn't reached critical mass yet,” Scavazza adds.

Topshop has broadened its fair-trade range to include outerwear, such as jackets and, in a spectacularly oh-la-la step that might just finally shake off any lingering worthy tones, hotpants. Oxfam has just opened three “concept” ethical fashion stores in West London. Given that this is an initiative with Jane Shepherdson, the former brand director at Topshop who is currently transforming Whistles, the 15 or so fair-trade labels that she has gathered together should add up to some desirable items.

Meanwhile, People Tree, the commendable label that was one of the first to support fair trade, has recently collaborated with some of the most interesting names from London Fashion Week, Richard Nicoll and Bora Aksu among them. It also has a T-shirt range in Debenhams. It is just a T-shirt range, mind you, but this is Debenhams, for heaven's sake - it doesn't get much more mainstream than that. For the extremely committed, there are GreenKnickers' fair-trade underwear (kaboodle.com or figleaves.com), including the emphatic Stop Deforestation designs, the ethos of which, one can only assume, doesn't extend to banning bikini waxes. Suffice to say, the momentum is clearly there. Even the celebrities are on-message.

Some £6.6 million of fair-trade cotton sold at retail in 2006; failure rates are high and it's hellishly tough out there but by 2007 that figure had risen to £52 million. Put that in your pipes, all you economic doomsayers. Perhaps £52 million is still but a freckle on the tip of the lovely (and often ethically dressed, especially when she's modelling M&S's fair-trade cotton) Lily Cole's nose, of course, and a speck compared with the half-a-billion pounds of fair-trade products that were traded in the UK last year. But it seems that consumer goodwill and curiosity, traits that used to be essential when it came to countenancing some fair-trade clothes, are not in short supply. It's sourcing enough fair-trade cotton to make the supply chain viable that's the problem; it now amounts to 1 per cent of the world's fibre. Of course, you could, as one blogger debating the merits of GreenKnickers on treehugger.com suggests, solve that problem by going without altogether.

PS: What you buy isn't the only issue: how you deal with your cast-offs is also a consideration. Customers who donate M&S clothes to Oxfam receive a voucher worth £5, valid for one month, to use towards their next purchase of £35 of M&S products.

Eco terminology
Fairtrade: the Fairtrade mark offers a “fair” fixed price and longer-term conditions. It also indicates that money has been set aside for local projects

Eco labelling: enables consumers to check certain production and evnironmental standards. The concept is still in its infancy, but the idea is that such labels will soon be as commonplace as food labelling

Sustainable: covers a wide range of critieria, including the abolition of pesticides, recycling, acceptable working conditions, monitoring energy efficiency and carbon footprints

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