Maxine Bédat and The Fashion Revolution

Next week sees the second Fashion Revolution Day. On the 24nd of April, the anniversary of the Rana Plaza disaster, people all over the globe will be taking time to ask the essential question--where do my clothes come from?
In the run-up to Fashion Revolution Day, The View From The Pier will be looking at the whole concept of fashion in the 21st century. Can you ever be truly ethical? What needs to change to make fashion a force for good? Most importantly, as we look at the event that sparked off the whole campaign: what can be done to ensure we never see another Rana Plaza?
The upcoming documentary The True Cost (which we featured on The View last week) has interviewed some big names in the ethical fashion field and asked these questions. They're featuring extended versions of these interviews on their site.

Maxine Bédat, founder of ethical fashion retailer Zady, recently spoke to The True Cost. Her comments were, to say the least, eye-opening. They can also serve as a call to arms, and a way of understanding that the current model that we call fast fashion isn't just broken--it's actively harmful.
Here she is on the global impact of fast fashion:

"The fast fashion model that has emerged in the past two decades is based on producing the lowest cost product possible. Human labor has always been the greatest cost of production, to create these disposable prices these companies have created a race to the bottom searching the globe for ever cheaper labor. To cut corners on the production of the material, fast fashion companies are producing the material by the cheapest means possible which translates to working in countries with little environmental regulation. They are, in essence, outsourcing the true cost of the apparel to those countries desperate enough to take them. As a result of all this, the apparel sector is the second most polluting industry in the world and a major contributor to slave labor."

The notion of cheap foreign goods is hardly a surprise, of course. But over the last twenty years we have seen a radical uptick in the amount of clothes we buy, even as the price we pay for them drops like a stone. It's not hard to see how this is possible, yet somehow we as consumers seem incapable of joining the dots, of understanding that materials and labour have to be at rock-bottom prices and made using sweatshop conditions to make apparal this cheaply. It's almost as if, in outsourcing the manufacturing, we've also outsourced our ability to care.
This wilful disregard for basic economic sense seems to extend to the brands themselves. Maxine says:

"We exist in a world where 61% of clothing companies don’t even know where their garments were made. 76% don’t know where their fabric was woven, knitted or dyed, and 93% don’t know the origins of the raw fibre, so you can see that while we find it quite basic to have this type of understanding, it’s a completely different way of doing business. Knowing the source is the only way to create a product with integrity."

I find it staggering that you can make and sell a product without knowing where the raw materials have come from, and yet that's exactly what's happening with fast fashion. The extended, opaque supply chain at the heart of the business means that brands can act in a kind of self-imposed bubble, only responding to calls for reform when they are actively caught in the act. Even then change is begrudging, and slow.
But change is happening, and events like Fashion Revolution Day are key to that. Maxine concludes hopefully, and with a rallying cry to the people that really can make a difference... us.

"As a consumer you have enormous power. When you make a purchase you are taking a stand, making a vote for what you believe in. We have the power to make fast fashion just a momentary blip in fashion history. That to me is incredibly exciting."

For more, check out the full interview with Maxine at The True Cost's blog: http://truecostmovie.com/maxine-bedat-interview/

Printing Technology

Traditional print crafts often celebrate and depict the world from which they came. Whether that be in the colours and dyes they use, or the designs that reflect the activities of the villages in which the people that make them live and work, vibrant local fabrics often have a story to tell. All you have to do is look.
The artisans of Tilonia, a village in the heart of Rajistan in India, have gone a step further. The people there have been helped by a social enterprise programme based on a partnership from the American-based Friends Of Tilonia charity, and Barefoot College, an NGO that has provided basic services and solar electricity to deprived areas of the sub-continent for quite some time. When the opportunity came to start up a business using the colourful prints of the region, the local craftspeople had a good idea.
They have launched a range of bags and scarves, using designs that represent the work that Barefoot College and Friends of Tilonia have done to help the village. A warm, circular motif invokes the solar power that has been installed and maintained by women trained by Barefoot College, while a rectangular pattern represents books, an indicator of education provided to women in the region. The artisans of Tilonia are skilled in embriodery, block printing and tie-dying. The new range of accessories uses those ancient skills in a clever new context, to celebrate the way modern technology has helped to transform their lives.
For more on Barefoot College's programme in Tilonia, check out their website: http://www.barefootcollege.org/

Worn Again: Closing The Circle

The march towards closing the loop on fabric recycling has just taken a giant step forward, as two big names in fashion team up.
H&M, the world's second largest fashion retailer, has joined forces with Kering, the French luxury brand conglomerate who has taken an increasingly ethical stance over the past few months, to announce their part in a new initiative. They're supporting Worn Again, a UK-based company who have found a way to seperate polyester and fabric from garments, enabling them to be fully recycled.

The trouble with a lot of modern clothing is its complexity. They often contain blends of natural and artificial fabrics, like the bit of lycra in stretch jeans for example. These so-called "frankenfabrics" are almost impossible to strip apart, making a lot of the clothes we wear unsuitable for recycling in the truest sense of the word: breaking them down and making new garments from the base materials.

Worn Again have cracked that problem. The 'circular resource' model they have perfected has, for the first time, made this costly process much cheaper and easier to implement. They can not only seperate polyester from cotton, but they can also remove dyes and contaminants. The end result: clean fibres that can be respun and reintroduced into the supply chain. Anna Gedda, H&M’s head of sustainability, says of the project:

"In the long run, this can change the way fashion is made and massively reduce the need for extracting virgin resources from our planet. Furthermore, it brings us closer to our goal of creating fashion in a circular model."

Worn Again is vitally important for both H&M and Kering, providing them with a cheap and sustainable source of raw materials. This lessens the impact on virgin resources, which is nothing but a good thing. It's early days for the new initiative, but rest assured we'll all be watching the results with interest.

The Label Tells The Whole Story

We always check the labels on our clothes, for washing and drying instructions. But what if those labels could cary other information: like the stories of the people who made the clothes in the first place?
The Canadian Fair Trade Network and Rethink Canada have teamed up to do just that, with eye-catching and thought provoking results. Their labels might be a little unwieldly, but they certainly grab your attention. And the tales they tell will make you think twice about the sacrifices that fast fashion forces on its workers.

Take this attractive burgundy hoodie--a perfect choice for relaxed weekends. A harmless, blameless item. Until you read the label:

"100% cotton. Made in Sierra Leone by Tejan.
The first few times he coughed up blood he hid it from his family. They couldn’t afford medical treatment and he couldn’t risk losing his long-time job at the cotton plantation. When he fell into a seizure one day it could no longer be ignored. The diagnosis was pesticide poisoning. The lack of proper protective clothing has left him with leukemia at the age of 34. He has two daughters. One of them starts work at the factory next year."

Or how about this mustard-coloured jumper? A nice piece for layering on a crisp autumn day. But what does the label tell us?
"100% cotton. Made in Cambodia by Behnly, nine years old. He gets up at 5:00 am every morning to make his way to the garment factory where he works. It will be dark when he arrives and dark when he leaves. He dresses lightly because the temperature in the room he works reaches 30 degrees. The dust in the room fills his nose and mouth. He will make less than a dollar, for a day spent slowly suffocating. A mask would cost the company ten cents."

The notion of transparency ties into ethical fashion in so many ways, and this simple idea, of giving us as consumers more information about the workers that make our clothes, is at the heart of the struggle. The work that the Canadian Fair Trade Network are doing is advocacy, but it's based on a belief that in order to do right, we have to know what we're fighting against.

Next time you check the label of your newest purchase, it might just be telling you more than what temperature to wash it at.

For more information on the work the CFTN are doing, visit their website.

The True Cost

A fascinating new documentary, coming to cinemas, digital and DVD/Blu-ray soon, hopes to make the case plain that global fashion is broken, and outlines what we can do to fix it.
Director Andrew Morgan was in New York in April 2013 when he saw the headlines. A clothes factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh had collapsed, taking the lives of over a thousand workers who had been forced back to work after evacuation following the appearance of cracks in the superstructure. That building was the Rana Plaza, and the event of the following months led Morgan to vow he would do all he could to make sure nothing like that ever happened again.
The result is The True Cost, a documentary that ties together the disparate threads that make up the complex web of services of fashion's global supply chain. From the slums of Bangladesh to the catwalks of Paris, the film sets out to show explicitly how our clothes are made, and why they cost so little.


In his Director's Statement, Morgan says:

"For too long now, conversation around this topic has suffered from over-simplified blame games. Political and economic complexities have allowed us to miss what is unavoidably clear – that this is first and foremost a moral issue. There is consistent irresponsible care of the environment, and clear violations of the most basic human rights. But this is something we can and must change."

With contributions from ethical fashion heroes like Lucy Seigel and Livia Firth (who also exec-produced the film) The True Cost promises to be a hard-hitting expose of an industry that has hidden an ugly side behind a veil of glamour. A little righteous anger could go a long way.
We'll be covering the film more in the next couple of months leading up to The True Cost's release in late May. For now, check out the trailer, and hit up http://www.truecostmovie.com for more.

Levi's Come Clean On Water Use

Clothes production is a thirsty business, and thirstiest of all is denim. The staple of casual clothing for the last hundred years, denim has always had a reputation when it comes to the amount of precious H2O used in its manufacture and aftercare.

Levi Strauss has more interest than most in the figures pertaining to this not-so-dry subject. In 2007, they launched a first of it's kind life-cycle assessment (LCA) on water use in the denim industry. Last week, it published a follow-up. It's a worrying read.
One pair of jeans is responsible for the emission of 33.4 kilograms of carbon dioxide, and uses nearly 3,800 litres of water. This takes into account all the processes involved in the life cycle of that sweet pair of 501CT's, from cotton production to post-purchase care. It's important to factor in what happens to clothing when it comes off the racks: fully 25% of that CO2 emission figure comes from washing.
And that's an interesting statistic, because it varies from country to country. In China, for example, you're more likely to wear your jeans for four times longer than in the US before throwing them in the washing basket. If Americans followed that model, they could save 50% of water currently flushed down the flue of their washing machines. In the run-up to Earth Day on April 22nd, Levi's are pushing an educational programme to help teach its customers how to use water more wisely, and to think about their consumption. The company can change its processes, but getting consumers on board is an important part of the challenge.
It's a task that Levi's is taking seriously. They're working hard to clean up their act on conspicuous water usage, saving almost a billion gallons of the stuff since 2011 through initiatives like teaching cotton farmers to grow crops using less of the wet stuff. By 2020, they aim to reduce their water use by 80%. Levi CEO Chip Burgh credits the LCA as a major incentive to change the way the company views and uses water, but acknowleges there's still more to do. He says:

"Our LCA findings have pushed us as a company to rethink how we make our jeans, and we’re proud that our water stewardship actions to date have saved 1 billion liters of water. By engaging and educating consumers, we can fundamentally change the environmental impact of apparel and, ideally, how consumers think about the clothes they wear every day."

Why not take the challenge yourself? Check out the "Are You Ready To Come Clean?" quiz on Levi's US website, and find out how you can do a little more to save water by washing your jeans a little less.

Good New (For Once) For Charities

Amidst the usual fireworks, shouting and all-round blatheration that accompanies the Budget, especially the last one before an election, it was interesting to see that, for once, charities had a glimmer of good news.

Following the prosecution of banks last year for manipulating financial data in the Libor scandal, £75 million in fines was collected from the guilty parties. That money is going to a very worthwhile home. Military charities and other good causes will be receiving funds in sums that include £25 million to set up a fund to help older veterans--including, for the first time, those injured in nuclear tests. Meanwhile, the Essex & Herts, East Anglian, Welsh and Scottish air ambulances will all be getting money to allow them to buy new helicopters.

Chancellor George Osborne said of the allocation of funds that it "took money from those who showed the worst values to support those who represented the best British values". I disagree with Gideon on most things, but for once he was, if you'll excuse the pun, right on the money. If only Osborne would clamp down on financial misdeeds more often, then perhaps we'd see more of this kind of thing.

Meanwhile, the amount that can be claimed through Gift Aid is being significantly raised: from £5000 to £8000, beginning in April next year. This is a big deal for smaller charities, boosting their intake through collection tins and online fundraising by £3000 a year. For some, this could mean the difference between survival and rolling up the shutters.

Let's not be too starry-eyed at Osborne's munificence, though. This government has been terrible for the Third Sector. Big claims for a partnership between the coalition and charities (hands up who remembers The Big Society) rapidly devolved into a situation where they were told to do more with less. The severe uptick in foodbank use is just one example where government policy has forced charities to pick up the pieces. The measures announced last week are welcome, but we shouldn't pretend that they're anything other than a politically-motivated handout. I don't believe that anyone in the Third Sector see this budget as anything other than a half-hearted attempt to curry favour. Whoever comes to power in May needs to do better by charities than this bunch of chancers.

The Detox Catwalk

You may remember Greenpeace's Detox campaign, which named and shamed big fashion brands for their quite literal dirty laundry. It's all too easy for garment factories to dump toxic spill into the ground water of the communities of which they are part, rendering that water useless. It's estimated that over 60% of ground water in China is not fit for human consumption.

The Detox campaign was key in getting a significant fraction of big fashion retailers to sign up to binding agreements to clean up their act by 2020. Nice as it would be to take it for granted that these companies will do as they are told, it make sense to check up on them. Hence the Detox Catwalk: an online platform specifically designed to monitor the big brands and their record on getting toxins out of the water that people use to drink and wash in.

Yixiu Wu, detox campaigner at Greenpeace East Asia, says of the Detox Catwalk:

“The fashion companies that have committed to Detox over the past four years represent approximately 10% of the global apparel and footwear market. We believe this momentum is creating a new standard in sustainable fashion: sparking a transparency revolution and proving that zero discharge of hazardous chemicals is within our reach by 2020.”

Transparency is the word, of course. Being upfront and honest about your processes makes it much more likely that you'll act ethically as a company. It's a positive feedback loop that, Greenpeace believes, is starting to show real results.

They're not alone. Liu Jianguo, associate professor at the College of Environmental Sciences and Engineering at Peking University, says:

"Increased supply chain transparency is good practice for sound chemical management, which will help decision makers draft and promote solid policies in China. Once companies are transparent, the public then has a chance to monitor what's happening in the industry - they have a chance to take part in the risk management of chemicals. In fact, it promotes good governance of this issue."

So who are the front runners this season? Greenpeace have added Inditex, Puma and Valentino to their Detox Leader board, while Chinese sportswear brand Li Nang and the mighty Nike are accused of greenwashing: talking the talk without walking the walk. It'll be interesting to see if this criticism, and the attendent bad
publicity, have the desired effect.

Find out more, and get involved at http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/detox/fashion/detox-catwalk/

Telling Stories

While reading a piece in The New Yorker on Shiguru Ban, the Japanese architect that creates buildings out of cardboard tubing, I came across a statement that gave me pause. It said:

This radical-chic architecture echoes a larger force at work in the marketplace. Just as the environmental movement spawned greenwashing, the altruistic bent of the under-thirty-five generation has given rise to what you might call goodwashing. TOMS, a company that started out making canvas espadrilles, has built a half-billion-dollar-a-year business on its “One for One” marketing platform: for every pair of shoes you buy it donates a pair to a child in need. TOMS has given away more than ten million pairs and its shoe dumps have engendered some controversy, of the giving-a-man-a-fish-versus-teaching-him-to-fish variety.

More important, it has inspired copycats. (See Skechers’s BOBS shoe collection, whose slogan is “Making a Difference for Kids” and whose marketing materials look like a Save the Children campaign.) Then there is Maiyet, the luxury leather and jewelry company born at Davos and sold at Barney’s, which employs artisans in the global South, pays them a living wage, and storytells the hell out of their narratives.

TOMS has always fascinated me as a company, regardless of how ugly I find their shoes (spoiler: very). This very notion of baking a doubled production into your company's mission statement is bold to say the least, and it's clearly working if sales and the appearance of copycat lines from competitors is anything to go by.

The slightly sneering attitude that the writer of the piece, Dana Goodyear, effects towards brands with stories seems a little short-sighted to me, and comes from someone that doesn't really know that much about ethical fashion. The truth is that there are hundreds of brands out there that put the stories of their workers front and centre on their websites and promotional material.

It's a marketing ploy, of course, but there's a bit more to it than that. Ethical fashion has transparency at its heart, and part of that is knowing not just about where your clothes come from, but who makes them. Expressing an interest in the lives of a cotton farmer in India, or a seamstress in Bangladesh, or a finisher in China means that we as consumers are much more likely to empathise with their struggles, and want them to do better. Decent pay and conditions for fashion workers can come from an insistence on the part of the customer that the brands they buy do right by the people who provide them with the goods in the first place.

Personally, I see nothing wrong with a brand that's prepared to show us the people that make our clothes. It means they have nothing to hide, no dodgy practices that drop costs but cause suffering. It's interesting that Dana Goodyear chooses to highlight Maiyet as a brand that 'storytells' its employees. The luxury market is rapidly rediscovering the notion of ancient skills and practices as a marketable commodity, and one that fits into high-end fashion in a fresh way. Look, for example, at Saigon Socialite, a footwear brand that blends traditional Vietnamese pagoda carving with luxury French leather to create stunning results.

I think a brand that has a story to tell about the people it employs is a brand that has a little more to offer from both an ethical standpoint and in terms of attracting consumer interest. We all have that one article of clothing that has an interesting story attached. We like to talk about our clothes. Let's keep the discussion going.

Watching The Future

I am, it has to be said, something of a techie. I'm writing this piece on the move using an iPad connected to a Bluetooth keyboard, tethered wirelessly to the 3G on my obscure-brand Chinese smartphone to access the web. So, of course, people have been asking me what I think of the Apple Watch.
That's an interesting question, and the Apple Watch is an interesting item. It's Apple's first move into the fashion arena, offering the must-have accessory of the spring/summer season. It comes in a huge range of prices and finishes, right up to a solid gold offering for £13K. Which seems a lot, until you actually look at what that money will get you for a gold watch in the current marketplace. In the world of luxury watches, thirteen grand is entry level. And those things only really tell the time.
The most intriguing part of Apple's recent presentation that launched the Watch wasn't about that object of desire at all. It was about the way their mobile operating system, iOS, is entering into ever tighter integration with health and medical services, even to the point of gamifying research into diseases like Parkinson's. It's often difficult to get people to sign up for medical research. If you make it as easy as playing a game on your phone, your database of results (and hence their likely viability) will go through the roof.
This is fascinating stuff, and opens up the notion of a wrist-worn computer (that, don't forget, has a built-in heart monitor) to all sorts of potential uses. A recent article in the Guardian put the case for the Apple Watch changing the way we donate and interact with charity and social issues.
Take the humble charity wristband. They're a blazing success story, with millions sold every year. What if, instead of buying a band for your favourite charity, you could download a branded watchface instead? It would cost the same to buy, but the charity wouldn't have to pay for manufacturing and distribution. More money therefore goes to the cause you want to support.
With location-based services very much at the heart of the modern mobile experience, the chance to be gently reminded about social issues when you're out and about comes into play. The Guardian uses the example of a nudge to sign a petition when you're near the obnoxious anti-homeless spikes that have been appearing on our streets, but maybe pop-ups when you're approaching your local Oxfam about their newest campaign could be a thing.
Health tracking is a big part of the reason many people buy a smart watch, and there are all sorts of opportunities to use that information to do good things. Virtual marathons, for example, where you can donate the miles you walk or travel in a day towards a cause. This is already happening in places that support the BetterWorld initiative (like my hometown of Reading), where you can log your activity and exchange it for goods and services. Then, of course, there's the advantage of wearing a health tracker that can automatically contact the emergency services the moment it detects a problem.
Of course, there are potential pitfalls to this new paradigm. No-one wants to be bombed with petition requests every fifty yards. Consent is key, as is the ability to easily adjust your preferences should you sign up to a service in a charitable flush only to find out that it really isn't what you expected or wanted. Clarity and transparency is key (as it should be in any charitable transaction) if you want your experience to be fun, rather than a chore. Or indeed, a privacy issue.
It's early days for the technology, and we already have naysayers and critics unifying against Apple, before they even go on sale. Experienced observers have, of course, seen all this before, and you could fill an article with negative early reaction to the iPod, iPad and iPhone that tend to blur into one comment--no-one will want one. The opposite has usually been the case, to the point where Apple's designs aren't just ubiquitous, but massively influential. There's a reason phones all look the same these days.
Although it would be foolish to predict the success of one product based on the performance of others, it feels likely that there will be a lot of people sporting an Apple Watch, or the Android equivalent, over the next few years. It will be fascinating to see how the move to a wrist-based way of looking at the world of information will change things. Let's hope that change is positive.