The Rise of Ethical Fashion

To some people they think fashion and they think health-obsessed models, but fashion likes to show its softer side now and again, too. In recent years, Erin O’Connor and many other fashion icons have encouraged designers to move away from ‘size zero’ models and the 90s saw supermodels shunning fur. Increasingly, ethics have been taken into consideration across the industry, from Prada to Primark.

So, why are retailers and designers so keen to shout about the green, ethical benefits as well as the clothes themselves? Maybe to downsize the moral panics that many associate with fashion, but shouldn’t their efforts be concerned with making the clothes and not moralising the masses? Organically grown cotton is used widely among many designers and labels, and it may be grown by fairly paid workers, but at what cost to the environment? Air freighting such organic goods is bound to leave a bad taste in any green-conscious member of the fash pack looking to reduce their carbon footprint. In February 2010, online clothing success ASOS launched its own ‘Green Room’, a whole section devoted to ethical fashion. Despite these considerate gestures to the fashion industry, to what extent is it really helping? Buying a fair-trade cotton t-shirt from ASOS’ ‘Green Room’ isn’t going to lift people out of poverty.

As well as the use of organic materials and using more ‘ethical’ methods, the fashion industry has also seen a rise in vintage clothing. Swap-shops and vintage boutiques have become rapidly popular in recent years, with celebrities such as Lily Allen opening their own shops specialising in vintage clothing. This is far more environmentally friendly that air-freighting organic materials across the world, and in some cases is much cheaper and guilt-free.

Fashion should be about artistic talent- not about worrying where the clothes have come from and how many air miles it took to get it here. The fun of the industry should be re-captured as it has lost some of the joy associated with it by trying too hard to convince us all of its’ clean image.

To this effect, we have lost sight to what fashion is really all about. When the focus of it moves from creating something beautiful that makes people happy into more political and social issues, it becomes something different and the creativeness is drained from it. Fashion can’t change the world on its own regarding poverty, only people can do that. However, fashion can certainly make us better dressed.