[0:00]Many companies like to claim they are ethical businesses. This can be because they believe in a moral approach to commerce. It might also be because ethical is a label that helps them increase sales. How can we discover if a business is ethical? We've been looking into the fashion industry and why your clothing has become an ethical matter. In the fast fashion industry, clothing brands compete to offer new trends as quickly and cheaply as possible. Pressure on time and cost is intense. It means tough working conditions and low pay rates for factory workers. Let's start off by talking about what is Fashion Revolution Day? Fashion Revolution Day is a global movement. Over 70 countries are participating, it's citizens around the world asking what should be a very basic question. Who made my clothes? Using the hashtag, who made my clothes? Protest movements like Fashion Revolution Day start because of scenes like this. In 2013, a factory building, the Rana Plaza, collapsed and killed over a thousand workers. This tragedy made the public aware of the dangerous conditions the victims had been facing at work. The Rana Plaza case made consumers really want to know where their clothes were coming from and how they were made. Um, critiques accused fashion brands and consumers of being responsible for the deaths. Many brands felt they had to guarantee their products were not coming from Rana Plaza style sweatshops. British fashion designer Katherine Hamnet was one of many who campaigned against the clothing industry for its unethical conduct. The campaigns against an ethical fashion started a movement where some labels and designers began to try to brand themselves as ethical. Um, it's been popular to focus on this environmental side of ethics. Green and natural is a nice message for consumers. Fashion retailer Marks and Spencer would like to sell its customers more ethical clothing, but sourcing enough fair trade cotton to produce the garments is a problem. amount of fair trade cotton in the world is available is tiny. There's probably less than a thousand tons actually available at the moment. MS's total use of cotton at the moment is 50,000 tons. So even if we took every piece of fair trade cotton in the world, there we wouldn't even touch the amount that we actually need as a business. At the London College of Fashion, the students who'll be the next generation's designers are reacting to the problem. They are trying to use only ethically sourced materials. The more I found out about the fashion industry, the more I kind of, I thought it was really horrible the environmental and ethical impacts that it has on the world. It just, I just don't think are acceptable. You know, I wanted the products to be beautiful in every aspect of them, so not only do they look good, but the when you look behind the scenes, they're good as well. The ethical debate in the fashion business has created a tension between the top priced labels and the mainstream brands. So the top designer labels can usually pay good wages. So they will sell you an item and might also try to convince you that no one got harmed for you to get that shirt. But high volume brands need the garments to be inexpensive and some of them will prefer you close your eyes to whatever harm might have been done. So looking across the whole of the industry, we don't have an ethical solution yet. But fashion now has strongly ethical players. After his range of ethical clothing was shown at a fashion show, Danish designer Peter Ingwersen told news cameras that fashion will become an ethical business. In the future, I actually believe that we won't see any separations between ethical fashion and more mainstream fashion. I think it's all going to be one. Anything that you wear will actually come under the same umbrella with very high standards. I think that's the way it's going to go. Ethics in fashion might be a genuine moral effort to abolish bad practices and make more ethical products. Or it could be just a kind of marketing. But if consumers become more responsible, the ethical dimension of fashion looks set to grow.
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[0:00]We've been looking into the fashion industry and why your clothing has become an ethical matter.
[0:00]In the fast fashion industry, clothing brands compete to offer new trends as quickly and cheaply as possible.
[0:00]Over 70 countries are participating, it's citizens around the world asking what should be a very basic question.
[0:00]Protest movements like Fashion Revolution Day start because of scenes like this.
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