My friend Jack is fanatically aware. He’s one of those macrobiotic, tofu-toting, vegetarian-shoe sort of people — the kind you’d quite like to poke in the thigh with a fork. So environmentally alert is young Jack that, until recently, he owned just one pair of trousers, knowing that a product’s longevity is one of the keys to planetary harmony. He wore those trackpants by day, and possibly by night as well. He wore them to save bears in the cloud forests of Ecuador and to sab hunts on the greenswards of Berkshire. Then, not so long ago, the bottom fell out of his trousers — literally. Jack was inconsolable. He buried his faithful trackpants in the garden, alongside his beloved guinea pig, Ortega.
It’s a sorry tale, but it has its message. Which is that, until recently, it was almost impossible to be fashion-conscious if you were eco-conscious. If you cared about the earth, you wore muesli sweaters and combats so stiff with wear that they could stand up unaided and protest against a road bypass. If you cared about fashion, you had to turn a blind eye to tales of sweatshops, child labour and environmental damage.
Now things are starting to change. We’re beginning to realise that our clothes come with a hidden price. “When you look behind the glossy surface [of fashion], you see suffering and exploitation; people are working for very low wages,” says the actress Sienna Miller, a keen consumer of ethical fashion. “I have been just as guilty as the next person in not wanting to think about this.”
Few of us do, of course. We may go out of our way to purchase fair-trade coffee and chocolate, but we don’t seem to give a fig when it comes to buying clothes. Yet the background story of your trainers or jeans might well disgust you.
Take Nike. While the company aims, laudably enough, to increase its use of organic cotton, a 2002 report by Oxfam found the sportswear giant paying some of its Indonesian workers as little as £1.10 per day. And it is not alone. How about H&M? According to the Clean Clothes Campaign, a pressure group committed to improving working conditions in the garment industry, H&M’s factories in Bangladesh “don’t allow trade unions, or give their employees contracts. Nor do they pay minimum wage, an unbelievably small 4p an hour”. And here’s something that would be an irony, if it wasn’t so cynical: the store sells bikinis to raise awareness and money for WaterAid and gives money to Terres des Hommes, a charity working for children’s rights and development. Bless ’em.
While we’re pressing that guilt button, try this on for size: the cheaper your clothes, the worse their potential for harm. It hardly takes a genius to see that the bargains on sale at your local knockdown store have been made for peanuts. And if you’re not paying for it, someone else is. The World Health Organisation estimates that 20,000 people die each year through pesticide poisoning in cotton production; and the chlorine compounds used in dyeing textiles release huge amounts of dioxins, the world’s number-one pathogens.
So, where can you buy decent clothes, at a reasonable price, that don’t abuse human rights, workers’ rights or the little fishes in the deep blue sea? Enter the ethical fashion brigade, the handful of companies who define themselves by their sound ecological and employment practices. For some, it’s a basic matter of principle, pride and respect. For others, it’s a brute business choice: customers, accustomed to asking the right questions about their meat and two veg (did this chop die with a smile on its face? Is this carrot a local?), are beginning to demand similar degrees of integrity from their wardrobes.
“There’s no reason why organic and fair-trade clothing can’t be sexy,” says Miller. “I think fair trade is going to have a huge influence on fashion. The clothes are great, you know where they come from, and you can be confident that people haven’t been exploited to make them.”
Companies such as Patagonia trade on their ecofriendly credentials. Its brand of environmental awareness and hearty honesty has become so fashionable, a friend of mine calls it “Pata Gucci”. All its cotton is organic, and in 1993 it was the first manufacturer of outdoor clothing to make fleeces using post-consumer recycled material (that’s plastic bottles to you and me). “We’ve saved 86m soda bottles from the trash heap,” it reports.
Interestingly, it is often the outdoorsy brands that lead the way in ethical fashion, perhaps because they are run by people with more of a feel for the planet than the etiolated CEOs trapped in the airless bowels of corporate America. One of the most enterprising is Howies, a cool mountain-biking brand based in Cornwall and specialising in slogan T-shirts (“Fish Farms F*** Fish”, for instance, which is a good deal more worthwhile than wearing an advert for FCUK splashed across your chest). Using organic cotton and channelling a percentage of its turnover into grass-roots environmental and social projects, Howies manages to be that elusive thing: fashionable and right-on.
Elsewhere, your best bet is to look out for clothes that comply with the Ethical Trading Initiative — though you’ll have to ask the retailer the right questions and hope that you don’t get one of those shop assistants who have trouble remembering their own names.
Katharine Hamnett is set to launch a new fashion range, Katharine E Hamnett, early next spring, which uses organic cotton, low-impact dyes and recycled metal buttons, rivets and packaging. She wants to develop a definitive global directory of certified manufacturers, sustainable labels and ethical retailers, a sort of “Green Pages”, which would give increasingly aware consumers enough information to make valid choices.
The question is, will we buy it? Hamnett passionately hopes that we will. “There has been a dramatic swing towards ethical purchases lately,” she insists. “A recent ICM poll found that half of Britons say ethics influence their choices. If your clothing says made in China on the label, you have to realise that it was probably made under horrendous conditions. Don’t stop buying fashion — don’t kill the industry — but do start asking questions of manufacturers, retailers and suppliers.”
It’s a case of “if you don’t like it, don’t buy it”. And if you do buy it, be a Jack. Wear those pants till they drop. Let them mature and evolve, like the person who bought them.
