Rethinking Ethical Fashion: Navigating Dilemmas and Redefining Industry Paradigms
The fashion industry is riddled with social, labor and environmental issues rooted in ethical dilemmas. The industry has become known as fast fashion, as it is ruled by rapidly produced cheap trendy clothing meant to be in circulation for a couple of weeks. This constant state of production and consumption has left the world riddled with disposable, synthetic-based pieces that will take hundreds of years to decompose. As we near a climate crisis, we must ask ourselves whether the fashion industry is really ethical and what we can do to take action for a better tomorrow.
What is Ethical Fashion?
There are a lot of definitions floating around ethical fashion, which have become synonymous to slow fashion, sustainable fashion and eco fashion. These attempts are to find an alternative to fast fashion, and to create defined meaning and frameworks to move onward and beyond our current fashion industry. Ethical fashion can very well be defined as a body of behaviors, practices and products that represent only a limited number of choices out of the numerous options. And honestly, the options are endless in a world full of companies and choices. Ethical fashion also speaks to the need of deciphering ethics and fashion in a world full of immoral and moral frameworks that require us to dress our very human bodies. Ethical paradigms in style need to be tackled in order to effectively start to rethink the larger social and economic paradigms upheld in the fashion industry.
As it stands, a lot of ethical fashion concepts and practices just focus on buying from “ethical fashion” brands although this only creates more clothing for people to buy and consume. It plays into the business-as-usual model and constant consumerism as a path towards solutions. However, we will not be able buy ourselves into solutions when the climate crisis demands a massive reduction of fashion production and consumption. To tackle present day issues, such as ethical fashion, will also require a holistic, intersectional lens that does not privilege some things over the other. This feat has proven difficult in the incredibly nuanced world we live in.
How Do We Practice Ethical Fashion?
Brands that attempt to ethically approach the industry often pick and choose where they are conscious and sustainable. It can mean choosing to source raw materials from a local village to help promote local jobs, while it increases exploitation and adds to our collective carbon footprint. This begs us to consider what ethical issues we need to support in the fashion industry, and whether this is fair to do so. If we have to choose from a (metaphorical) bag of ethical choices, is ethical fashion really ethical if it's not fully ethical?
It calls into question whether businesses can really be ethical fashion brands, especially when it maintains the capitalistic systems we operate under; and whether there is truly an ethical fashion brand we can support. Obviously, style and authenticity is still essential when fashion is a way to self-express, and to curate a visual and creative identity. The balance between style and morals begs the question of how to literally see ethics in fashion. This is despite ethics not being visual, nor do ethical practices in garments have a distinctive look, unless it is branded or looks high-quality or durable.
You can also believe in ethical fashion but only own clothing from fast fashion brands. However, the root of ethics in fashion may very well lie in whether values and concepts can be placed into tangible products and things. Brands have increasingly become myth-makers, creating tales that rely on symbolism and metaphors to sell products. In turn, branded ethical fashion has also become a symbolic exchange to display our affiliation to fashion that is doing some things in a better way.
As consumers, we are living in a highly visual world where the objects we wear are signal senders. It is extremely profitable for ethical fashion brands to make logo embalmed products, yet will the products reflect our personal values and authentic self in a hyper-branded world? However, consumers are not responsible for fixing the fashion industry through our shopping choices. Businesses, organizations and governments should move towards systems that care for both people and the planet, which will create equity and freedom for all.
How Important Are Our Ethical Fashion Choices?
Some argue that our ethical choices are materialized values transferred into physical goods, which are then commodified for consumption. Meaning is transferred into these objects, but what if our values were not materialized within clothing? Can we really be ethical fashionistas if we don't wear clothing from ethical fashion brands or don’t give clothing a deeper meaning? The material reality of clothing is very much a hard truth, cut and shaped fabric is just fabric. However, ethical fashion seems to speak towards intentional thought on how we make, consume and dispose of clothing. Ethical fashion, in this perspective, is not about the fashion itself, but the moral ideologies embedded within its supply chain practices. And, self-styling our bodies is a part of our desire for visual aesthetics alongside these ideologies, to speak more deeply to the way we want to look and feel in the world.
Yet, ethical fashion is not simply about our individual moral ideologies and choices as consumers. To make an ethical industry possible, systemic change is needed. We find ourselves increasingly surrounded by brands that prioritize profit over people, with lack of care for the earth or people. Brands that claim to be part of the solution often reach for a couple solutions in the ethical mix, choosing to only care for certain issues to look good. Greenwashing has no better example than H&M’s eco-fashion collections that supposedly help the earth through their sustainable efforts, yet are made from exploited garment workers.
What Would a Ethical Fashion Industry Look Like?
An ethical fashion industry for all needs to be envisioned and imagined. It currently does not fully exist and is hard to visualize in the world we live in. It opens up questions on what an ethical fashion industry would be like, such as whether society would be forced into boundaries of acceptability in personal behavior. Would personal freedom become limited to the current doctrine that society mandates for us to follow in the name of morality? Creating an ethical fashion industry for all also calls into question what moralizing discourse would be prioritized and whom it would target.
Who would we blame for the current state of the fashion industry and who would do the blaming? The wearer, producer, and brand are very much interlinked and part of a bigger supply chain, a web of actors in the fashion industry making choices every single day. Yet, who is responsible at the end of the day for fast fashion? Some claim that that the locus of responsibility should be placed on the corporation versus on individuals, especially when their economic choices are often immoral and are causing our current climate crisis.
Consuming our way into an ethical fashion industry may very well be needed if capitalism is not dismantled alongside fast fashion. An ethical industry rooted in capitalism would look very different compared to one in a different economic system, such as socialism. So if an ethical fashion industry exists within capitalism, is ethical consumption really the only answer? As things stand, to reach a true ethical fashion industry would mean changing the game itself- where everyones (organization, groups and individuals) mindset, habits, and consumption patterns become radically different to take on politicized action against social injustices, both within and outside of the fashion industry.