Yesterday: London Fashion Week February 2011: D2 – EstEthica: How ethical is ethical?
Tomorrow: London Fashion Week February 2011: D4 – EcoLuxe: London’s take on ‘green’ luxury
The multitude of issues related to sourcing, and the incoherences of all things London Fashion Week and EstEthica in this respect, have been bugging me for a while now.
For one, I am amazed by how well kept secrets supplier contacts are. While I realise that each designer has an interest in not diverting his or her suppliers’ interest towards other buyers, the resulting dependence is certainly not the best possible panorama.
But it also happens that even brands present at EstEthica talk of their ethical credentials primarily in relation to social credentials, e.g. job creation, fair labour conditions etc, and within that first and foremost of the apparel making individuals or units. In which case everything related to the making of the fibre, and the cloth or fabric used is forgotten, or else, ‘not a problem because it's natural fibres‘ such as silk or cotton.
Neither of the above approaches helps us much in bringing about change. Ethical suppliers, be they certified in one way or another, or still too small to obtain certification, need be able to survive. And unless enough potential buyers (i.e. designers and brands) know about them, and they therefore are able to fill their order books, they will struggle to survive, or even go broke. To me, this is for evident reasons the worst imaginable scenario. One which in fact can be relatively easily prevented by just actively spreading the word, as simple as it is.
The issue naturally starts much earlier than the making of apparel, namely right in the fields where the fibre is grown – which at least as far as natural fibres are concerned, in most cases will be cotton. A fact that is strikingly well illustrated by the documentary “Nero’s Guests”.
“Nero’s Guests” is about Indian cotton farmers’ suicides, and why in some areas up to 10 farmers per day decide to take their lives, despite having a whole family with children depending on them.
The documentary follows P. Sainath, the Rural Affairs Editor of The Hindu newspaper, who is the 2007 winner of the Ramon Magsaysay Award, Asia’s most prestigious prize (often referred to as the ‘Asian Nobel’), for Journalism Literature and Creative Communications Arts. The documentary shows him travelling to the rural areas of Maharashtra (the state with Bombay as its capital), encountering families of farmers that have committed suicide, meeting farmers that explain how and why the cotton yield does not cover even their most basic needs for survival, and travelling alongside labourer women disowned of their soil, and who get up at 4am to catch a train by 6am only to spend up to 16 hours doing menial work for the better off. They may not be back home before midnight, and restart their daily routine only a few hours later, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Their children hardly see their mother, with the young ones having forgotten who their mother is by the time they are a toddler.
This is the landscape of a geographical area which, other than Gujarat or Kerala, has so far been bypassed and forgotten by the Fairtrade movement, and where the economic and labour conditions remain equally harsh and unforgiving as they were throughout India before anyone dared to care.
To get a picture of the documentary and the topic it covers, please take some time and view the following two YouTube clips:
- Left: the official trailer of “Nero’s Guests”
- Right: a 6 minute extract from the documentary
Video: Official Trailer of “Nero’s Guests
Video: 6min exceprt from “Nero’s Guests
Personal note: I would like to thank Benita Singh from Source4Style for kindly inviting me to the occasion of the documentary’s first UK screening at the Frontline Club in London.
Tomorrow: London Fashion Week February 2011: D4 – EcoLuxe: London’s take on ‘green’ luxury
Yesterday: London Fashion Week February 2011: D2 – EstEthica: How ethical is ethical?
