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Ethical fashion, sustainable fashion, or eco-fashion. Tell her how you want it, but don’t you think it’s time to support initiatives like this? Caring for the planet and all it offers us depends on not letting our guard down in any of the aspects that could harm it. That is why it is important to pay attention to ethically made clothing.
Not only in the most obvious, such as transportation, internal recycling, or resource-saving, which are still very important. But also in small habits, such as the way we dress.
What is ethical fashion?
Let’s start by commenting on what ethical fashion is and how both terms are linked to give life to this movement. Ethical fashion aims to combine our clothing style with our lifestyle, as well as promoting environmental values that allow us to breathe cleaner air. Ethical fashion was born to answer the problem that low-cost fashion creates.
Access to clothing at such a low price makes production increase. And this implies an increase in the exploitation of resources and waste, as well as more pollution in water and air.
It is a concept that encompasses the entire life cycle of clothing, from its production to the end of its useful life. In addition, to be able to classify it as such, one of the main requirements is that:
• It is made of durable materials.
• Its creators must work in decent conditions in their positions.
Ethics and fashion
At first glance, it seems impossible to reconcile, but it is not so. Ethics and fashion go more and more, especially after the appearance of brands like the ones we will see later.
There is a large volume of consumers concerned about the origin of the clothes they wear. And one of the requirements before buying is to make sure they are durable.
In many fashion e-commerce, you can see how they are starting to emphasize this aspect and even position themselves as green brands. With what is far from being two incompatible elements, they show that together they work better.
Sustainable and ethical fashion
When we talk about sustainable and ethical fashion, we cannot neglect the problems related to the precarious working conditions to which the employees of production factories in some parts of the world are subjected. Sustainability, in this sense, became an important issue in the early 1990s, when, for the first time, the exploitation of workers was discovered by some important fashion brands.
To cite a few examples, in 1992 Levi’s was accused of failing to pay its employees properly; in 1996, Nike was the one that, despite its campaign against child labor, used minors to produce some of its products; and in 1998 Adidas, accused of forcing Chinese political prisoners into forced labor in exchange for a small sum of money, also caught the eye of the storm. These are just some of the events, the list is still long if we consider the scandals that followed the birth of the phenomenon of fast fashion, ie the fashion in which production takes place faster and at the lowest possible cost to go on the wave. of current trends.