Ethical Fashion

“Bananas vs. Bras, that’s the example they always use to explain this complexity”, notes Lizzie Harrison, designer of ethical brand Antiform and general fashion philanthropist. I scratch my head and wonder how on earth the “Bananas vs. Bras” theory was going to help me along in my ethical fashion journey. Because it turns out that conscientious consumerism is pretty confusing and not at all as simple as slapping a fairtrade sticker on something, so I was trying to avoid anymore confusing theories.

But she continues, “If you were talking about the supply chain of fairtrade bananas, you’re talking about the people that grow the bananas, so you have to go and audit the banana factory. If you’re talking about a bra you might have cotton, so you’ve got a cotton farmer, you’ve got the people than spin and dye, you might have some polyester elastic- which is plastic- where’s that coming from? You’ve got metal in the hooks and eyes, where’s that metal coming from? You know what I mean? It’s so complex”.

I do know what she means. This, if nothing else, is true of ethical fashion: it is complicated and the supply chain is nearly impossible to decipher. We can look to all the obvious disturbing facts, like how in 2010 the sign on fee for the new CEO of Marks and Spencer, Marc Bolland, was £15 million, which could have paid for the living wage of more than 10,000 of their garment workers*. We also secretly know something has gone awry if we can buy a dress from Primark for £4 as student Dea Nielsen points out, “if it costs £4 it’s probably not produced in an ethical way, sometimes what it costs can be a clue as to who made it and how it was made.”

Aside from the face-slapping immoral statements, visibility in the production of clothes is not easy to come by. And that is often the excuse we use to push the issue under the carpet, Nielsen observes, “people become really overwhelmed by how difficult it is to know enough about it to make a good choice and they kind of just decide it’s too hard.” She muses, “maybe if the government pushed for more transparency and made requirements of the retailers it would make it easier for people to make good choices.”

This is why Antiform and other independent fashion brands provide us with more opaque options. “What we do is we offer people the opportunity to connect to fashion”, Harrison explains in reference to the independent brand she runs in Leeds. “When you walk into our shop you see a shop but when you turn sideways you see a factory and you see people sat sewing on industrial sewing machines. And the number of people that walk in and go ‘is that a sewing machine? That’s huge!’ Yeah, that’s an industrial machine ‘Oh is that how clothes are made?’” In one visit to Antiform you meet the designer, the creators and the shop assistants. Unless you have your own personal jet you’d find it pretty difficult to nip over to India to check the working conditions of the workers every time you bought something from Next.

DIY Rug Dyeing – A Documentary of the Experiment – nickienoel

Some of you who follow me on twitter may have seen my tweets about dyeing a rug.  I scored a slightly gnarly free rug on freecycle with the sole purpose of dying it & using it in my flea market booth.  I love the idea of giving new life to something that would otherwise be one step away from the landfill.  If you are the same way, or you just want to freshen up an old rug you have laying around, here’s how I did it.

Materials you’ll need for dying 1-3 area rugs:

- And old crappy rug.  Or a nice one, I guess!  Note that the rug must be either wool or nylon.

Exactly what I was thinking about the gold rug. My canopy for the booth is hot pink, but there are other venues that only allow white canopies. I thought the gold one would look nice in the white canopy. So, maybe I’ll have two sort of “looks” for the booth if I leave it as-is. It really is nice. It’s lined & everything! Seriously it would weight like 100 lbs when fully saturated with dye. But you could do it Nic. It wasn’t bad! I did empty a tub of yucky dog-hair-water on my foot when cleaning the rugs, but the actual dyeing was quite pleasant.