Showing posts with label Baroness Young. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Baroness Young. Show all posts

Sunday, 13 December 2015

what is ethical fashion

http://www.refashionawards.org/about/ethics This account links fashion teaching to the sudden outbreak of crassness in 2005. One example quoted in a Centre for Sustainability in Fashion textbook is of a dress designer who contacted fairtrade-certified suppliers in India because, for whatever reason, she didn't make dresses herself. They all turned her down. So she went to Bangladesh, got the dresses made, and used vaguer words to sell them. They were said to be "ethical" because they were woven by a firm like Remploy in Bangladesh, but the person's trade association, Ethical Fashion Forum, did zero to promote Remploy in the UK, which closed, so I don't think their idea of "ethical" was a good one.

Centre for Sustainability in Fashion

Centre for Sustainability in Fashion is a government quango paid-for by a grant from Nike and taxpayers' funding towards universities via the Higher Education Funding Council, although people in the UK have to pay to go to uni via the loan system; these people still get a grant and use offices from a landlord that has housed similar organisations - Own-it to promote use of IT law, Creative Connexions to promote Chinese factories to UK designers (yes, really), and a students union, language laboratory and photography teaching workshops. Those are the bits that students have to pay for via the student loan system. Centre for Sustainability in Fashion appears less crass than other projects funded the same way, but more crass in acting as "secretariat" to the "all party group for ethics and sustainability in fashion" in the House of Lords, led by someone that some government made a lord of course, which has no obvious funding but does have a treasurer.


The All Party Group for Ethics and Sustainability in Fashion began by crowding-out an existing all party group and one or two potential members or speakers, like Lord Sugar who tried to speak about better training for people in UK clothes manufacturing. It held a Westminster Hall Debate, based on the kinds of topics available in the House of Lords Library if you search "ethics" and "fashion". Then it started again with a second Westminster Hall debate, following the style and agenda of Futerra Communications

Futerra Communications


The technique is to use a phrase so vague that it begs a question, and then answer that question how you like.  There is also a lot of vague language so mind-numbing that you are softened up for a real whopper of a lie that passes un-noticed. Their blurb says that people made their own clothes in the UK up until the 1950s. True? Of course not but amongst all the rubbish it slips-past.

Futerra agency got a lot of commercial business from the UK government, with £165,000 turnover that year from one ministry at DEFRA. That's the one that ought to have kept up to date with badger biology and flood defences, but was used as a PR budget by government instead:
https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/funding_futerra_funding_refashio#comment-51088

Ethical Fashion. What is ethical fashion?

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ETHICS AND FASHION

So what is "ethical fashion"?
Just like fashion, the term means different things to different people, from vintage clothing to paying a fair wage to cotton farmers.
In essence, ethical fashion represents an approach to the design, sourcing and manufacture of clothing which is both socially and environmentally sustainable.
Our timeline explores the relationship between ethics and fashion.

1950s: Fashion for the elite

Couture is king, and the burgeoning industry caters for the social elite by producing unique and luxury items. Everyday folk follow fashion by making their own clothes.

1960s - 1970s: Fashion for the people

With the advent of mass production, fashion suddenly becomes accessible to the public. Fashion houses and retailers set up production overseas to the developing world where labour costs are lower.

1970s: World fashion movement

The birth of the modern environmental movement combines hippy fashion and values has a major effect on culture, creating an interest in "world" fashion.
Shops spring up around the UK, selling ethnic style clothing and accessories sourced directly from producers around the world. Traidcraft and Oxfam start selling clothing and crafts to support communities. People purchase these for charitable reasons or because they like the product, not necessarily to be fashionable.
Pioneering brands such as Patagonia start to address environmental issues in textile production.

1980s - 1990s: Mass production and consumer backlash

Mass production swiftly gathers speed, and the first global brands emerge. By the mid 1990s stories of sweatshops hit the news headlines. No Logo by Naomi Klein is published in protest.
Consumer awareness of the plight of garment workers emerges, along with high profile campaigns targeting high street brands. Gap and Nike develop and publish ethical sourcing programmes.
A handful of fashion businesses, such as People Tree and Bishopston Trading, lead the way in targeting an alternative, niche group of consumers. This new market is not yet trend led.

1990s: The business of ethics

Corporate attention turns to business ethics. Becoming a good corporate "citizen" is the watchword and socially responsible sourcing rises up the business agenda. Meanwhile, in the UK, environmental issues are formally included in school and college curricula.
In response, the first mainstream brand to bring out an environmental range is Esprit with the launch of it's Ecollection in 1992. Gossypium and Katherine Hamnett are leading the way in researching and developing organic supply chains.

2000 - 2005: Ethical fashion takes off

By 2000, new fashion graduates are setting up labels with environmental and social goals.
The Millenium Development Goals on poverty, climate change, rapidly growing public appetite for "green", and this new generation of designers lead to the creation of the ethical fashion movement.
In 2004, the Ethical Fashion Forum launches in London, while the Ethical Fashion Show presents ethical fashion labels to major buyers.
And in 2005, Anti-Apathy brings together a top notch line-up of speakers, including Katharine Hamnett, live music and leading ethical fashion labels at London's first high profile ethical fashion catwalk.
Trends in consumer buying habits show that the market for fashion is polarising into two groups - low cost, "value" fashion and a growing group of consumers disillusioned by mass manufactured brands looking to buy unique and individual clothes and supporting creative new labels. High street retailers respond by bringing out "designer" ranges, stocking smaller brands and signing deals with designers and celebrities.

2006-2008: Ethical fashion goes mainstream

Small businesses started with the millenium are rapidly growing in size and profile, including Howies, American Apparel, THTC, Kuyichi, Terra Plana, and Ciel. Esthetica is launched at London Fashion Week in 2006 as the first ethical fashion section in a mainstream international tradeshow.
Big name designers start to develop ethical collections including Katharine Hamnett and Stella McCartney. Big retailers start to take the issue on board more seriously. Gap launches product RED in 2006. H&M, Next, Nike, Sainsbury's, Asda and M&S all stock organic/fairtrade ranges.
And consumers get involved through Swishing - a term coined by Futerra to describe glamorous clothes recycling parties.
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Sunday, 8 September 2013

Baroness Young of Hornseas' full speech at Ethical Fashion Source Summit

Baroness Young of Hornsey of the all-party committee on fashion gave a speech, criticised in the post below. The is in favour of clearer explanations by shopkeepers, collaboration in industry internationally, and compromise. The speech was to an organisation that claims to be a forum but selects speakers from big business and related consultants.

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Baroness Young of Hornsey's speech to Ethical Fashion Source Summit, July 2013 [video times in minutes and seconds from the video below]

Oh Gosh!

No. It's so refreshing. I love coming to these events because it's so different to the house of lords, as some of you might guess! It's not known for its fashion sensibility. I've had some interesting adventures there as some of you might imagine. I have to share with you, although I am not going to name names, that a colleague of mine was told , first of all, that it was against the rules to wear cropped trousers. For a woman anyway - it didn't say anything about men.
And then she was reported to one of the highest authorities in that house of lords for being dressed "flamboyantly". In the bar! [11.19] So that's part of the context in which I work. So it's refreshing to be here. Although I have to say that I have been involved in arts and culture for many years.

Although, again I would say, though, that since I started working in the fashion sector. In this bit of the fashion sector, I hasten to add, I've found a really refreshing engagement with politics with a small "p". I think that comes naturally, as it were: if you are concerned about
-the environment; if you are concerned about
-workers' rights,
-all of these different issues, how can you not be political?
So after years of having worked in a sector that kind-of wanted to distance itself from politics, for me it's very refreshing and energising to work with a group of people for whom that - that, linked with the creativity and the innovation with is at the centre of what they do.

Now sustainability is a word that has so much currency in so many different ways, that it has started to become, I think, a bit devalued, and perhaps over-used and mis-used. When I introduced that into the terminology of my all party parliamentary group, there were some questions about it, particularly as it was linked to fashion. And I think that, even in the three of four years in which I have been involved in this sector and working with these campaigns, there has been a change, as Tamsin [the chair] has already indicated. But even: there has been a change within the House of Lords. Because the people there that I am working with have come to understand. So actually I have got an excellent group of people who are working with me on this issue. And they come from lots of different perspectives. And that's absolutely fine. They also come from different political parties which is really great, because it means we have a common understanding of some of the key issues that we are working with.

I just want to go back a little bit and say how I cam to be involved. I have always loved clothes and fashion ever since I was a kid, in the old days, when people would make their clothes from the bits of fabric that they would get in the remnant box in John Lewis in Oxford Street, run-up something on the machine (glue it together if there wasn't time) and then go out to a party. And of course, at that time, there wasn't High Street Fashion. There wasn't that sense that you were being driven by magazines of by celebrities to go out to these shops and buy-buy-buy, because the shops weren't there. All of that has changed. I think that, while there are some good aspects to that, it's actually becoming increasingly difficult to argue that that represents a democratisation of fashion, when other people are being oppressed, and indeed loosing their lives, because of that change. So there are a lot of issues here for us to think about, whether that's as consumers, as retailers, as makers, as designers, or as educators.

Interestingly, I think that fashion still has this sense of being something that is a little bit frivolous, and something that girleys do and are interested in, and so not very important. Or, that we are all pretty stupid and dumb, and we go-out and buy things because we've been told to do that. And of course in some respects, there is a little bit of truth in that, in the pressures that are put upon - particularly - young women to conform to certain ways of wearing clothes; certain ways of being in the world. But there is also so much that is to do with stereotyping and stigmatisation of certain groups in society.

I'm very much against the idea that there are a load of young people who all like sheep and go-out and do-stuff. However, I think I do want to make it clear that consumers do have a responsibility. And interestingly, I think that young people are at the heart of that sense of responsibilty. Of course, there will always be some who say "I don't care what happens to those people over there; those people mean nothing to me, and therefore I am going to shop the way I shop", whatever that is. But I think for the most part - certainly the young people I come across when I go out to schools to do talks or have young people in the houses of parliament to do talks, there is a very keen sense of responsibility [16'00'] but a lot of it is about not knowing what to do with it. Not knowing where to go. The questions I get asked most frequently are "OK: what clothes should I wear; where should I shop, what should I do?". And those are really difficult questions to which one has to answer: "it's very complex". And that, you know, is not an easy idea to get across: "it's very complex". What kind of a response is that? It feels like you are trying to sit on the fence and not say very much. [She doesn't say: "buy from democratic welfare states if you can".]

So one of the things I want to say is that: we have got to find new fresh ways of explaining ...
very succinctly and in a way that has real impact, to the market; to consumers, what it is that we are about and why it really matters what they buy, how they buy, where they buy it, and so-on.

I'm not going to replay the statistics to you. Although I've got this one about us all having about £30bn of clothes stashed-away in our wardrobes, and I sometimes think or feel that most of that £30bn is in my wardrobe! It has overtaken my bedroom, which looks like a teenage girls' at times. But, you know, it is a serious point. There are loads of these statistics - whether it is to do with the amount of water we use; the kinds of chemicals that we use in dry-cleaning. So all this work which we have to do about post-consumer waste and over-use of water and so-on and so-forth. So again this adds to the complexity and the number of messages that we need to get across to people.

"Those people": the reason I am emphasising consumers is that in a capitalist society, it is about making money. It is about a very kind of crude sense of what it takes for an organisation to make a profit. And that needs to be linked to a sense of Consumer Action, Consumer Urgency, and indeed there is a sense in which we need to think about throwing-out that word Consumer because it does imply a certain passivity which we would not want to encourage necessarily. So I think it is very important to think about what it is that we want people to do and to think about.

In February, earlier this year, I was in Copenhagen giving a presentation to Danish MPs on our all party parliamentary group, and explaining how we structure that, and how it works, and what we were meant to do. And again that was very instructive, because this is all about an international movement. It's not something we can do or think-of, only in terms of one particular country or one particular market. It is very much about how we can collaborate with people across the world. And I know that there's a lot of initiatives going-on as a result of what happened in Rana Plaza, which hopefully will gather even more momentum. [18'56"]

It was interesting: during the horse meat scandal, horse-meat-gate, I think people became more aware of the difficulties which lie behind and industry with a highly distributed supply chain. This idea that - you see people, even when we look very carefully at a packet of whatever it is. Burgers. And we see that it is £1 for 2 burgers. There is no connection in peoples' heads about what that actually means. And again in relation to the fashion industry, I sort of thought of our horse meat scandal as being something like Uzbekistan cotton, with all of the issues and problems around that. However, all of that was overtaken by the disaster that happened at Rana Plaza. Like many others, I would say "of course we do not want that to happen again", but the issue is, how do we do that? How do we stop that happening?

I think that. Well. You know this phrase "don't let the best be the enemy of the good". [20'00"]
Personally, I'm not into beating retailers about the head. I'm not into going to Primark and saying "you've got to do this", or "you've got to do that". I'm really interested in what sort of dialogues we can set-up. So one of the pieces of work, if you like, that the all-party parliamentary group does, is to be open to every discussion, to find out how the business works, and make suggestions about who to contact and who to work with, with a view to improving that situation.

I think that government - I've been pleasantly surprised, that after Rana Plaza, the government did call on major retailers and say "look: what are you going to do about this?". And fortunately Labour Behind the Label have produced the Accord, which a number of major retailers have signed-up to, and there are other initiatives which are going on elsewhere. And I wanted to - I don't want to take up too much more of your time because I know that you are running late, and there's lots more to get in, so I am just going to summarise what I was going to say, very quickly here.

In terms of what needs to happen next.

Well obviously, you are all here because you all feel very strongly about it. Part of what it is about getting the word out to more people.

And some of the proposals that are coming forth. I think that some of them are really good. But what we need to do is to try and formulate them into a kind of global strategy, if that is not much of a world domination type of speech! But it is about being strategic in what we do. Otherwise we will all be running-around, using lots of energy in what we do, and duplicating, and not being as effective as we might be [by letting Ethical Fashion Forum ignore human rights or the need for new tariff conditions against Bangladesh forcing Bangladesh to introduce a welfare state. She didn't say that].

So post Rana Plaza, the situation has changed. One would hope that it would be impossible for it not to change. So there is a momentum. It is up to us all to keep up the momentum, and as Tamsin has already said, "it can't happen again". But, you know, it is really easy to say that. [22'00'] But I don't, at the moment, without being particularly pessimistic, I can't have the confidence to say that there isn't another Rana Plaza waiting to happen, whether that is in Bangladesh or in India or in Burma, where new factories are being built to - kind-of - cope with the fallout from what has happened in Bangladesh. We can't be confident about that.

So that work which we have to do. We have to keep on doing it and we have to collaborate. I would be very much in favour of some kind of coalition being formed. [It has in the EU parliament. She didn't say that.] But that kind of thing has to be organic. It has to have people to drive it forward. But if it isn't to happen again; if there is anything we can do to stop that happening again, then obviously we need very much to be involved with that and make sure that we have some kind of global campaign that has clout, and nous, and intelligence, and is formed from all the different parts of the sector that we really like. Thank you.Baroness Young of Hornsea, All Party Committee Ethical Fashion, stooge



Planb4fashion is a blog by Veganline.com which is a vegan shoe shop

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Not sure if Baroness Young called activists a hinderence - it mighthave been in a discussion that wasn't on video

I watched the free video of her speech: glad I'm not the only one to think it weird!

  • No mention of a welfare state as a way of reducing poverty.

  • No mention of American tariffs on a token amount of Bangladeshi products being raised.

  • No mention of an EU parliamentary motion reminding the Bangladeshi government of its commitments.

I had used Writetothem.com to tip her off about Ethical Fashion Forum's position, and to urge her to mention the political world outside.

Sadly, Ethical Fashon Forum isn't just for the big business insiders who appear as "experts" and run "masterclass" events. It's a pop-up lobby that has only existed for a few years, and sprang-up at the same time as some taxpayer-funded lobby groups, Esthetica at London Fashion Week, The Centre for Sustainability in Fashion at London College of Fashion, Own-It, and the one that sponsored "Making it Ethically in China", Creative Connexions. Creative Connexions closed after swallowing millions of pounds of higher education funding council money, but the others are influential lobby groups and highly selective in what they choose not to say. They would be pleased with Baroness Young's speech.
Baroness Young calls activists a hinderance | Ms Wanda's
Baroness Young calls activists a hinderance | Ms Wanda'shttp://www.mswandas.co.uk/2013/07/19/baroness-young-calls-activists-a-hinderance/At The Source Summit last week Baroness Young called “puritanical activists” a “hinderance”. Fashion Mob founder, Esther Freeman, thinks she’s…

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Thursday, 5 September 2013

Ethical Fashion Source Summit

source.ethicalfashionforum.com/article/live-stream-registration-source-summit-2013

It was possible to register for live viewing of some of the ethical fashion source summit. I just be watched bits. One surprise is that their 300 "Call to Action" results so far are generally polite calls to government, mainly calls to western governments to pressure Bangladeshi government, followed by calls to trade and consumers.

They still have not got specific in what they publish about trade block's ability to influence third world countries through tariff conditions. Nor do they mention any kind of welfare state - either in publicising the benefits of welfare states and using them as a sales point for goods made in them, nor in using tariffs to allow third world governments to introduce something like a national insurance scheme without loosing great market share as the price of their goods rise.

For example it was mentioned that Kenya is likely to get its 0% tariff with the EU renewed without any benefits to people who want affordable schools healthcare and pensions, and not to be undercut in the labour market by people who go without.

http://source.ethicalfashionforum.com/digital/bangladesh-240413-never-again-join-the-industry-in-a-constructive-response is where to give your own response, if Ethical Fashion Forum accept it
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The Ethics and Sustainability in Fashion all party group


House of Commons - Register Of All-Party Groups as at 24 July 2013: Ethics and Sustainability in Fashionhttp://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm/cmallparty/register/ethics-and-sustainability-in-fashion.htmTo work with the fashion industry to: develop political solutions that address issues such as the environmental impact of excessive consumption; assess what the key issues are… Centre for Sustainable Fashion, part of the London College of Fashion, acts as the group’s secretariat, with assistance from Made-By.

Two odd things.

First, the group has no obvious funding but it does have a treasurer. They do not have to declare their accounts and I know of no public accounts for them.

Second, the group reads a script very similar to that put-out by Futerra Communications. They tried taking an independant line when first set-up, with a speech put together from the House of Lords Library, but then they had a second westminster hall debate making speeches in the more usual format. The one that slithers from the vague word "ethical" to the pale word "sustainable" while you're not looking; the one that answers its own question "what is ethical fashion?", and the one that hasn't heard of a welfare state as a way of reducing poverty, and the one that pretends manufacturing is impossible in the UK and that instead we taxpayers benefit hugely from the chains of expensive shops with all their warehousing and PR that we all enjoy in our shopping centres.


Planb4fashion is a blog by Veganline.com which is a vegan shoe shop


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