These days, everyone is aware that their actions – and their purchases – have consequences. Everything we buy comes from somewhere, which means it is made by someone: and we’ve started to realise that those people deserve to be paid properly for their labour, so they can pass on a good quality of life to their family. Big business is regularly slammed for making billions out of the sale of products that have been purchased from their makers for pennies. The tide of fashion consciousness has turned – the modern fashionista is more concerned with where a garment or accessory came from than with who made it. This has been labelled, like everything else: “ethical fashion” is here to stay. Business, fortunately, is catching on to the trend. That’s what fashion is, after all – reading market trends and supplying clothes or accessories that fit with them. The 21st century market is all about ethical decisions: buying stuff that has a traceable or transparent origin, ensuring that a decent portion of something’s price goes to the people who made it in the first place rather than the corporation that has undertaken to sell it to the masses. You’d think that would just drive overall prices up – if companies have to pay proper living wages to their third world “employees”, they should just be recouping those costs in the end price of their garments and rc flying fish bags. That wouldn’t work, though – ethical fashion demands that a set proportion of the overall price be given to the workers, so if the companies put the overall price up they’d have air angry bird to pay their third world helpers even more. What has happened instead is that big businesses have had to learn to swallow some profit loss in order to retain their customers. After all, it’s all very well making a profit – but if customers aren’t buying any of your goods, because they think you don’t pay so well as you should for the articles themselves, you won’t sell anything and then you’ll make no money at all. Better, says ethical fashion, to make a little profit than zero profit: and so, for once, the big companies kowtow to their customers and everyone goes home a little happier.Of course, the actual shift in pay doesn’t need to be that huge. Third world countries are, after all, third world, which means that “living wage” takes on a whole different definition. A living wage for a third world worker could be less than ten pounds per month – a figure, in other words, that enables them to live well and support a family. Some proponents or backers of ethical fashion are perhaps unaware of the distinction – but it is pretty important to realise that making workers rich in comparison to the cost of food and shelter in their country is neither implied nor demanded by the concept. So, ethical fashion has to walk a fine line between paying well and paying absurdly over the odds given the price of food and housing in the country in question.It’s a tricky calculation. Done well, though, it works – and offers hope for these people in terms of a secured future for themselves and their RC Air Swimmers family. Now that’s fashion worth wearing.
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