A sustainable fashion reporter looks for new ways to keep readers abreast of fast fashion issues like the recent Bangladesh garment factory disasters. 

The media moves stunningly fast these days, and the consequence is that stories like the recent Rana Plaza garment factory disaster in Bangladesh and the impact of breakneck production of fast fashion, are often relegated as old news within hours. As a busy reporter and editor at the heart of the eco news scene, Amy DuFault is all too familiar with the pace of today’s media machine and the cost of not paying full attention. “It will happen again and again,” she said. “Until we start realizing that consuming at the pace we are currently cannot support human rights or the environment.”

DuFault decided to take matters into her own hands by creating and promoting a run of limited-edition t-shirts emblazoned with the names of the four garment factories at the center of the garment factory crisis: Spectrum, Ali, Tazreen and Rana. According to DuFault, “Each of the four garment factories listed on the t-shirt have contributed to roughly 1,618 deaths, an equal amount of injuries and serial maiming that goes beyond human recognition.”

Beyond drawing attention to the crisis, the t-shirts were made to show that, as DuFault says, “fashion can be done right.” Inspired by Experimental Jetset’s “John & Paul & Ringo & George” design, the t-shirts use non-toxic water-based inks and are made from an entirely traceable supply chain by TS Designs in Burlington, North Carolina. 100 percent of the proceeds will go to the Clean Clothes Campaign to support their continued coverage and monitoring of working conditions in the global garment industry.

We caught up with Amy DuFault as she got set to launch the initiative, here’s what she had to say:

Rowena Ritchie: Why is it so vital we keep the Bangladesh disasters fresh in people’s minds?

Amy DuFault: The New York Times wrote recently that Bangladesh was the deadliest disaster in the history of the garment industry, but the Rana Plaza factory in Bangladesh was just one of many garment factory disasters. There are deaths daily in garment factories from faulty old machinery maiming people, to blocked fire access routes during suffocating fires. In the case of Bangladesh, I feel like we hit an all new low when a factory could illegally retro-fit extra floors to accommodate bargain chains so that the managers could fulfill even bigger orders, faster. All this constant shopping to fulfill some aching need for meaning… our need to buy cannot ever come at the expense of another human being no matter how deep our addiction.

RR: Why did you feel personally motivated to launch this initiative?

AD: My original thought with all this was to just get money together from all my colleagues who were tweeting and Facebook posting their hearts out. Many of us felt we might need to start a support group from how depressed we all were hearing the daily death tolls, seeing those horrible images of young women sticking out of rubble and labels from fast fashion houses all over the place.

Speaking on a personal level, I went to a very dark place feeling powerless and that having been a part of the sustainable fashion industry for more than 8 years now–how could it have only gotten worse?

But through it all, I saw new leaders emerge and groups like the Clean Clothes Campaign, who are really taking action by reporting, protesting, and getting people to sign petitions that legally bind companies to fair labor rights. I wanted to support their efforts by helping to keep the story fresh in people’s minds.

RR: What’s the significance of making a t-shirt – don’t people have plenty of them already?

AD: It’s true, we do have tons of t-shirts in our drawers… I recently met Eric Henry from TS Designs when I was in Manhattan and I was wooed by his story of “dirt to shirt” manufacturing in Burlington, North Carolina. His story seemed to me a perfect fit with what I wanted to do–create awareness of basic human rights in garment factories, but show how fashion can be done right on a human as well as environmental level from “dirt to shirt.” Every t-shirt we made has a number on it that you can track and see who made your shirt. Everything is made and produced within 100 miles of Eric’s facility and there is little he doesn’t know about his business.

That there could be some slight possibility that a shirt made sustainably from beginning to end in this country could help remember the plight of garment workers thousands of miles away–and potentially start a conversation that starts a bigger dialog–is such a powerful thing.

Top Image:  Dan Cutrona

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On May 13^th, 2013 H&M signed the Accord of Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh.

Nearly three weeks after the Rana Plaza garment factory in Bangladesh collapsed and killed more than 1,120 people and injured many more, H&M signed an agreement with the mission to prevent similar disasters.

The Accord of Fire and Building Safety was drawn up by a labor coalition including IndustriALL Global Union, Clean Clothes Campaign and Workers’ Rights Consortium, and was published over a year ago. The Accord calls for a safe and sustainable Bangladeshi Ready Made Garment (RMG) industry where workers do not have to fear fires, building collapses or any other accidents that could be prevented with sensible health and safety measures.

Basically, the agreement requires companies to provide suppliers with more financial support in order to make the necessary factory safety upgrades. The plan established in the agreement is for a five-year period, during which the signees would actively take part in reviewing, implementing and enforcing factory safety regulations. Working together to develop a worker complaint process and a method for employees to report risks are also part of the agreement, which will be overseen by the International Labor Organization.

The aim of the agreement is to develop a nationwide factory safety initiative, which would require collaboration between a broad coalition of brands, the Bangladeshi government, industry associations and trade unions. There are more than 5,000 garment factories in Bangladesh where workers often make no more than $40 a month.

“Fire and building safety are extremely important issues for us and we put a lot of effort and resources within this area. H&M has for many years taken the lead to improve and secure the safety of the workers in the garment industry,” says Helena Helmersson, Head of Sustainability at H&M.

This Accord was drawn up and published on May 13, 2012 and activists have been pushing companies to sign it ever since. Why has it taken such a horrible event to spur agreement? Although H&M has implemented some factory assessment measures in the last few years, they obviously were not effective or worthy of a leadership title in garment worker safety.

The Accord was signed last year by PVH (Tommy Hilfiger  and Calvin Klein) and German retailer Tchibo, all of which have just been joined by several European companies including Inditex (Zara), H&M, British retailers Tesco, Marks & Spencer, Primark, and Benetton. Today is the final date for companies manufacturing in Bangladesh to sign the agreement, the measures of which need to be implemented within 45 days of signing. Wal-Mart, the second largest retailer to outsource garment manufacturing to Bangladesh, refuses to sign the agreement. Target, JC Penney, Sears, The Children’s Place and The Gap have yet to sign. If the carnage of the Rana Plaza collapse wasn’t a wake up call, what will be?

Image: rijans

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ColumnConscious life, hear me roar.

I have just returned back home from running around Manhattan and New York Fashion Week. As you might imagine, an intense week full of long legged runway models, moody designer presentations, and the deep bass beats of stylish music gives New York City the air of theater, sex, and retail desire. It’s also a week-long voyeuristic sneak peak at what we all hope to be wearing next spring and summer when emerging from our winter cocoons.

Fashion is sexy. It serves as both a transformative power pill and a retreat for the world-weary. It’s a place we can go to to become stronger by the very clothes we wear and in lieu of the fact that our inner strength isn’t enough. Power is sexy. If you think I am wrong, point me to the runway show you’ve been to recently that shows women hunched over in house dresses looking down at the ground from nerves.

Fashion is all about power and I couldn’t help thinking about it this past week. There were even times when photographing shows I put the camera down a little in order to see the model walking at me with my own eyes instead of through a lens. Some of them reeked of this confidence so much that I laughed out loud. It’s their job to trick us into believing that a certain look is all we need to get by in this world. It is their job to act as a visual representation of a designer’s ideal, a paper doll with folded tabs that takes off and puts on outfits that when our own, will help in terms of better jobs, business deals, romance and getting the job done.

While I am lucky to be covering sustainable fashion 99% of the time, where designer’s “About Us” pages tout social responsibility, closed loop technologies and organically grown fabrics, most of the fashion industry is just not there. Nor does it really care to be.

Case in point, waking to a story this morning on the Pakistan garment factory fire that has left (as of the writing of this column) 289 dead. In this, the biggest industrial accident in the country’s history, we are left to scratch our heads and wonder how this could be or maybe we don’t want to look at it too closely at the risk that it will tell us something about ourselves.

The “Inspection of industrial units by the provincial labor department was mandatory under the rules until 1997 when it was banned after demands by influential industrialists in the Sindh and Punjab provinces,” Shujah-ud-Din, a senior research associate at the Pakistan Institute of Labour, Education and Research, told Bloomberg by phone from Karachi. Factory accidents also claimed 419 lives in 2008.

The Karachi garment factory itself had locked fire exits, barred windows and there wasn’t a sprinkler in site. A single staircase connecting four floors became kindling for a boiler in the factory that burst into flames, engulfing all floors that were connected to it. Workers chopped away at the bars with tools to jump from 4th story windows – pregnant women, old men, nephews, aunts. People trying to make a living so that society could wear something new.

I recently interviewed Elizabeth Cline, author of Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion. Cline told me, “To our credit, it took consumers several decades to be convinced that they no longer wanted to own beautifully made clothing and to make them forget that $20 does not in any way buy a well-crafted garment.”

In a fast fashion crazed society, where we want more, faster, cheaper, we will always have stories like this in the headlines. Hard-working people who will accept being modern day slaves to put food on the table and a roof over their heads.

You will read all the headlines on this factory fire story and it will stay with you for a bit, until you need a new shirt, a pair of boots or a party dress. You might even consider the tragedy when you walk through the front doors of your favorite fast fashion chain. But you probably won’t be able to stop yourself once you hear the deep bass beat from the well-positioned speakers, the beads and bold colors merchandised like candy, the other women around you, arms laden with pretty dresses at $19.99, and how could you?

You were conditioned to shop this way. But let me tell you something, I think you can start walking past these stores, in fact, I think you can stay out of the mall entirely. I think you can plan ahead and look for the right designers who don’t have factories like this – who pay their workers fairly, who let them work from home who don’t treat them like animals.

People often tell me I can shop responsibly because I know so many designers, I just “know how to do it.”

But knowing how to “do it,” and realizing one has a responsibility to “do it,” are two completely different things. One requires making a call to the eco-boutique or hitting the local consignment shop and the other? Well, that requires lowering the camera and looking at life with a real-life lens.

It requires considering not just yourself, but the lives of many others.

Between the Lines is a weekly column by EcoSalon’s Editor-in-Chief on navigating the sometimes-sharp, sometimes-blurred lines of conscious life and culture between city and country, between inner worlds and outer.

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Your fashion choices reveal your political views, whether you want them to or not.

There was a time when tags like “Made in the U.S.A.” meant something. During war times, when buying cotton was limited by choice to only the bare necessities (unless you wanted to be considered unpatriotic by your neighbors), we could directly trace how our consumption habits related to our society’s values. Since then, flag waving morals within fashion have more or less disappeared along with the great American garment factories. With the internet, the world is a much smaller place and sadly, our sense of social values and our concern for our neighbors seems to have shrunk, as well.

The “Made in ____” label actually means a lot on the front of world politics. It relates to tariffs and trade agreements, which government worker rights and standards you support, and the bottom line: the price. The reality is that we haven’t been paying the real price of goods for decades. Whether it’s our own government that has been manipulating the price of our products through trade agreements and tariffs, or the Chinese government subsidizing their labor costs to dominate the world’s production market, it’s all coming back to us. We’re starting to pay for it: prices are going up, jobs have been lost, the environment is at risk, and fashion is once again on the center stage of politics simply by what we choose or don’t choose to wear and how we acquire goods.

Flash Sales

As of late, it seems there are very few things besides sales that get consumers excited to buy more clothes in the middle of a recession. For fashion, an economic recession translates to a mad rash of online flash sales.

According to industry reports, in 2010, on average, flash sale sites reported a 300% increase in sales even though the economy had not nearly recovered. The frenzy these exclusive, one day only, sample sales stir up in consumers (who are fearful of missing out on getting the last designer bag at sample prices), runs parallel to the fears the economy stirs up in times when everyone is fearful of losing their job. The general philosophy behind these shopping patterns is to get as much as you can while the getting is good.

While flash sales encourage cut-throat consumer shopping habits, the fashion industry’s ever cheerful motto continues to be “It’s just fashion, no one’s dying over it,” but the truth is that people are dying over it.

Last December, 25 workers were killed and another 100 were injured in a factory fire in Bangladesh, and that is a highly visible case where the workers died directly because of poor safety standards in the factories. Most factory workers end up severely crippled with chronic health disorders related to a life of hard labor working with toxic materials. In China, by law, the media is forbidden to report on human rights issues. However, recently the Chinese government has made great efforts to clean up its act and provide better working conditions in factories for their people. If you consider factory labor camps where workers are required to take two hour naps on cots underneath their machines mid-day so that they can last the whole 18 hour shift to be humane working conditions, you’d be wrong, but you’d also be part of the status quo. This might be the reason for the other hot trend in fashion sales this year: fashion philanthropy.

Fashion Philanthropy

Clearly, people are concerned about the human condition and want to put their dollars toward something meaningful when they buy their clothes. So, for just about every cause, there is a fashion company doing double-duty selling products to raise money and awareness.

Designers, from Vivien Westwood and Stella McCartney, to companies like the Gap in collaboration with Bono’s Red Campaign, have made huge waves in social awareness by fundraising and sales through profit sharing and partnering with philanthropic causes.

In 1983, Katherine Hamnett launched her line of political fashion tees. While Hammett’s flavor of fashion politics is now outdated, her company was one of the first to market giving a percentage of the profits away to charity, and for this reason she’s considered a pioneer. Luckily, savvy social media experts, marketing campaigns, and branding have allowed fashion philanthropists to become subtle yet clearly recognizable in their charitable product placement. Today, the hint of a rubber bracelet hanging just below your shirt cuff is enough to let people know where you stand.

These affordable tokens serve as status symbols among the high ticket donating entrepreneurs and socialites alike.

The Political Implications of Stepping Out

Just stepping out in a cheerful frock from H&M seems to have political implications these days. We used to be able to buy clothes without a care in the world about who made them, what they were made of, and how the world might be affected. Today, what you buy says quite a lot about who you are and what you stand for. Want to really know where a fashionista stands on political and social issues? Just look at her feet. Shoes are one of the most coveted and telling items in a woman’s closet. You can really tell a girl’s views, values, and how far her morals go just by looking at her footwear.

Take, for instance, these shoe made by Osborn, a company that works with a fair-trade organization in Guatemala to employ traditional craftsmen who are paid a fair wage for their work. At just a glance, these shoes belie a wearer who has a creative lifestyle, who generally stays current with what’s happening in the world of art and design, but who has some rebellious, hippie-heritage deep down leading her to choose to support skilled craftsmen and favor ethnic chic patterns in her fashion statements.

Then there’s the vintage shoe. Their owner is practical, well educated, frugal, slightly sentimental, likes fashion but does not follow any known trends, and probably could be pegged as someone who reads a lot of books. Her old school, working-class-Americana political views are reflected in her subtle lifestyle choices which she carefully cultivates at great pains. When asked about politics, she has well-informed opinions that she exercises at every election when she faithfully votes at the polls.

Next, take a Tom’s Shoe. Similar to the Fair-Trade Osborn model, Tom’s is far more successful in sales and recognizable on the street. This is the Prius of shoes, and like the Prius, it gets twice as many miles to the gallon. For every shoe you buy, Tom’s gives a pair of shoes to a barefooted child in a third world country. Anyone found wearing this shoe chose to support Tom’s cause just by buying these slightly homely slippers. The owner of this shoe proudly reads The New Yorker, is educated, social, political, cares about others and also, about what others think. Even if her interest in philanthropy is ever so slightly pretentious, she is making a conscious choice to do good through her fashion choices, and she feels that’s better than most can say.

Next, there’s the Ferragamo shoe. This is a shoe that is hand crafted by highly skilled craftsmen who have refined fit and quality to an art form over the past 100 years. These heritage shoes are built to last. Women who have known the Ferragamo shoe covet them as heirlooms from their mothers and grandmothers. Even to the average eye, these shoes equate class distinction and old money. To a more critical eye the wearer of this shoe has discerning taste in quality, comfort, and luxury, and is educated but conservative in her world views. Politics? She’d rather not say; she generally keeps her opinions on such things to herself.

Several steps down in class, but not in price is the Louboutin shoe. The higher the stiletto, the higher maintenance the girl. Her greatest aspiration in life appears to become a life size Barbie doll in a Barbie McMansion married to Ken. This kid is a Freudian field day if you can crack the lacquer. She likes flashy cars, big cigars and diamond rings. Politics never come into conversation with this one, and she only attends high-brow charity events as arm candy or with her best friend (the other hot girl). Just don’t take her for stupid; she knows exactly what she’s doing, what she wants, and nothing is going to get in her way.

There are millions of other shoes out there, all of which have something different to say about their wearer, but on the political front of fashion these are just some prime examples of what your shoe choices alone might say about you. What does the rest of your wardrobe have to say? What if every new item you bought was seen as a vote for the ethics in which you want the future to follow, if every time you saw a college student ready to go out in a Forever 21 frock you were reminded that she supports work camp labor? And while choosing to wear a skimpier swimsuit at the swim club could cause a scandal in uptight social circles, in the material world, it certainly could help reduce fabric consumption.

Even if we never return to the glory days of WWII rationing, as fashion continues to get dragged through the trenches for wreaking havoc on delicate planetary ecosystems, one can only hope our wardrobe choices become a lot more thoughtful and truthful, to protect them.

Image: blog.compete.com, www.sometimefriend.com, www.gliving.com, www.thriftaholic.blogspot.com

Editor’s note: Louise Lagosi is not the author’s real name. Catch our fashion industry insider’s insights and revelations every Friday at EcoSalon.

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