Fairtrade fashion hitting the streets
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Fairtrade fashion hitting the streets |
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What is fair-trade fashion? Well it’s a complex idea, with any number of intricate problems to contend with. Or so you would have thought. With the amount of time the major players in the industry have been dragging their feet and only paying lip service to the main issues, it would seem fairly traded fashion is the industry’s own personal white whale. To be fair ‘official’ Fairtrade cotton has only been around for relatively short amount of time, the Fairtrade organisation initially announced it in November 2005, and since then there have been some very positive steps taken by some of the larger high street shops. Yet it is still to see the uptake that other Fairtrade-certified products, such as coffees and chocolates, have benefited from. A cursory glance at the websites for the high street fashion retailers is enough to show that the fairly traded fashion goods they stock, if they stock them at all, are still playing second fiddle to their main product lines. It only takes a meagre understanding of what Fair-trade is about to see that this really isn’t going to help anyone. It will take integration of the fair-trade products into the main product lines to have any real and lasting effect; moving fair-trade clothes from a sidelined, ‘conscious-clearing’ exercise, into the mainstream of our high street buying practices. So what’s stopping this happening, where’s the roadblock? I mean it seems to make perfect sense, and the idea that all the people who make the product are getting a fair deal is something I’m sure we’d all like to see become a reality. Well the main sticking point for the industry, and our society as a whole, is that fairly traded goods mean an eventual shattering of several white lies we’ve grown rather fond of over the years. Mostly this concerns the matter of cost. Mass production, mass buying power, and exploitation in various forms and degrees of severity has created a false market, where fashion items can be purchased relatively cheaply. Certainly, the prices of fairly traded goods come as something of a shock in comparison, however this too is something of a misleading economic existence. Sidelined as it is at the moment the fair trade fashion market is hampered by its limited production runs, and in a cost conscious market fair trade fashion suffers as something of a luxury, a treat for the soul. What if it were mainstream though, what if fair trade fashion could benefit from the mass buying power of the entire industry? Well it would certainly make the products more competitively priced, we are after all still working in the realms of commercial structures, it’s not about radical programs subsidising cotton growers in order to shield them from the ‘real’ world of commerce. The idea is to give those same cotton growers a fair price for the cotton they produce. It really is not a case of ‘rocking the boat’ in fact we would be righting an already unstable one. So how do we get there? How do we move forward from where we are now to where we really should be? I believe it’s a mixture of two things: awareness and interest. Public awareness of what fair trade fashion is; something which I think is partly the responsibility of the industry, and then it is our responsibility to show the industry that there is a real public interest in these products. This year’s Sustainable Urban Style Today (SUST) fashion show brings both of these things together in one event. It is a fantastic opportunity to come and see what is out there, on the fringes of the industry; fair trade is for fashion what the next biggest underground act is for music, everyone is talking about it, but it’s not quite made it yet. Come and be a part of the future. James Warner |
Action for Sustainable Living, St Wilfrid's Enterprise Centre, Royce Road, Hulme, , M15 5BJ.Email: [email protected] Tel: 0845 634 4510 Fax: 0870 167 4655. |