One of the main discussion points within the fashion industry concerns its ethics. Last year’s discovery of the supposedly mysterious hand-sewn labels found on brand new Primark garments pointed to the poor conditions that the workers had been subjected to. For example, they were ‘forced to work exhausting hours’ and in ‘degrading sweat shop conditions’. There was something so loud and poignant about the messages. They exposed a real voice, a voice that is never truly heard within the fashion industry. Unfortunately, a few months later the labels were found to be fakes set up by campaigners; whether this was a hoax or not, it certainly got us all questioning our shopping sensibilities.
Prior to that, we also observed the Rana Plaza disaster in April 2013. When one of the biggest garment- producing factories in Bangladesh collapsed killing 1133 men, women and children and injuring over 2500. This was the worst tragedy to hit the garment-making industry in history. All due to the poor conditions that the factory was built in, the terribly cramped spaces in which the workers were forced to work in and the generally foul maltreatment they faced from their employers.
Yes, we all love Primark for its bargain prices. However,
this is just another big problem with fast fashion. With the price tags being
incredibly low, we are almost encouraged to buy-in-bulk this seemingly ‘great’ quality
merchandise. ‘Great’ clothes until a month later when you find out that every
crop-top you purchased has fallen apart due to just everyday wear. My point is
that these garment factories employ people to work like slaves for hours on end
without any breaks in order to produce 20,000 garments every week, including
your crop-top. And after discovering that, I presume you would ordinarily throw
that crop-top in the bin, again deepening yet another already grave issue – waste
and the disposable society. When we throw away a piece of clothing, it does not
decompose straight away, instead it gives off a gas 20% more damaging to the
environment compared to CO2, solely due to the gas that contaminates the
clothing when it is being made in the factories.
I do, however, understand that cheap clothes are a necessity
and that high-street clothing is deliberately accessible to us all. I do think
it all comes down to the lack of alternatives; don’t get me wrong, we do have an
excellent array of charity shops, which offer clothes at the same price as we
see in Primark. However, I feel that charity shops are not necessarily able to
cater for a low-income family’s entire needs.
After the Rana Plaza collapse, there was rather a revolution
in fashion. Britain, alongside the rest of the world, actually began to raise
awareness of the matter; however, issues surrounding ethical fashion still
remain one of the largest problems within the fashion marketplace. The question
we will continue to ask is whether the big retail giants like Primark will take
matters into their own hands and fully respond with a strong attitude in order
to deal with humanitarian concerns that we – as consumers - need to know are
being tackled.
