Ethical Fashion Essay

529 Words3 Pages
What is ethical fashion? Ethical Fashion is an umbrella term to describe ethical fashion design, production, retail, and purchasing. It covers a range of issues such as working conditions, exploitation, fair trade, sustainable production, the environment, and animal welfare. Why is Ethical Fashion needed now? The high street clothing industry accounts for a massive share of Western retail. Every year, 100 million shoppers visit London's Oxford Street alone. Globalization means that materials and labour can be purchased in different parts of the world where costs are very low. Also, industrialised methods of growing cotton mean that fabrics can be produced quickly and cheaply, and in very large quantities. These savings are passed on to the customer, meaning that high street fashion is available at increasingly low prices, and much of it is regarded as disposable. However, Ethical Fashionistas would argue that all this has a cost that we are not able to see on the price tag. Some of the issues around Ethical Fashion Ethical Fashion aims to address the problems it sees with the way the fashion industry currently operates, such as exploitative labour, environmental damage, and the use of hazardous chemicals, waste, and animal cruelty. Serious concerns are often raised about exploitative working conditions in the factories that make cheap clothes for the high street. Child workers, alongside exploited adults, can be subjected to violence and abuse such as forced overtime, as well as cramped and unhygienic surroundings, bad food, and very poor pay. The low cost of clothes on the high street means that less and less money goes to the people who actually make them. Cotton provides much of the world's fabric, but growing it uses 22.5% of the world's insecticides and 10% of the world's pesticides, chemicals which can be dangerous for the environment and

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