Somehow you feel like tragicomically laughing at the state of our very sad and rather mad world. By pure coincidence I recently heard that House of Fraser may be start selling soon a childrenswear collection by a Glasgow-based streetwear brand (with a penchant for advertising videos featuring alcohol abuse and other assorted shenanigans...) that mainly employs prints that could be considered as pastiches of everything trendy, vulgar and meaningless (ah, finally tops with inverted crosses for kids - an absolute must for Rosemary's baby...), and discovered that the most unqualified person with absolutely no journalistic training writes about fashion for three different Italian publications. Yet these aren't the most unbelievable things around.
One of the most unbelievable piece of news around at the moment is indeed that H&M, Gap and Levi Strauss recently made it into Ethisphere's World's Most Ethical Companies list for 2014.
The New York-based research institute worked out its results from studies made by an advisory panel that includes professors, government officials and attorneys interested in ethical business practices. Following a rather obscure rating system defined on the Ethisphere Institute’s site as "the Ethics Quotient™ framework", the panel analysed the companies and assigned different scores in different categories - ethics and compliance program, reputation, leadership and innovation, governance, corporate citizenship and responsibility, and culture of ethics. As the Ethisphere site states, the chosen companies "truly go beyond making statements about doing business 'ethically' and translate those words into action".
In many ways you get the impression that ,while their panel of experts may be full of amazing professional people, they may not know the final meaning of the word "ethics" and of the adjectives derived from it.
There is no arguing indeed that most fashion retailers show innovation, reputation and leadership, but, when it comes to social responsibility and sustainability, most manufacturers of clothes simply do not care, as for most of them, it's not human beings who count, but it's human beings (read: them) who count money.
In this case it seems that "ethical" is a rather general adjective covering specific areas, including training, legal compliance, and the amount and quality of the refreshments at a shareholders' meeting. But, as used by this research institute, the term doesn't seem to cover the conditions of garment factories in countries such as Bangladesh, India or China (just to mention a few and not to mention illegal factories in Europe...). It is indeed surprising that no really ethical fashion company following certain standards of manufacturing, production and labour, appears in the list, but brands and mass retailers who were previously the subject of investigations about pouring chemicals into China's rivers (H&M, Nike, and Adidas) or who have been caught using exploited labour (H&M, Gap, Nike, Adidas, Marks & Spencer...) do appear in Ethisphere's ethical list (for this or the previous years).
This is actually the fourth time H&M makes it to the "Most Ethical Companies" list. The Swedish chain has actually been trying to clean up its act for a while now and in April will be launching two allegedly sustainably-produced collections - Conscious and Conscious Exclusive. But for two collections that are conscious, there are another 48 that are polluting the world, exploiting people, putting at risk the workers who make those clothes or the person who wears them.
Transparency is currently very trendy: Fashion Revolution Day organised for 24th April 2014 will be commemorating the victims of the Rana Plaza factory complex that collapsed in Dhaka, Bangladesh, last year (official death toll: 1,133 people; plus 2,500 people injured/permanently disabled). The campaign is currently asking people to wear an item of clothing inside out, photographing it, share it with the hashtag #insideout and ask the company that produced it to tell us more about the people who manufactured that specific item.
Yet, while this is an interesting idea, it is extremely unlikely that a company may reveal you where they made a garment, or the real labour costs and the methods employed to manufacture it. It is even less likely that, asked where they produce not even their "It" bags, but the small metallic parts or metal logos that adorn their garments and accessories, famous fashion houses will tell you "Oh, you know, just random factories in Italy where illegal Chinese workers are exploited".
Quite interestingly and bizarrely enough, while the results about the World's Most Ethical (WME) Companies list were unveiled, H&M was busy retiring a menswear vest that was deemed as anti-Semitic and received complaints by some consumers.
The garment in question featured a skull in the centre of a Star of David. You could argue that there was no intention to offend Jews, but this was just the result of the umpteenth attempt at appropriating random religious symbols for fashion purposes probably done by a very ignorant trendsetter/designer/team of designers working with cut and paste techniques (rather than by somebody with a genuine knowledge and respect for religion - see Lea Gottlieb using in her swimwear, Jewish symbols including the Star of David and the Menorah), but that vague Neo-Nazi feeling remains.
Mark Gardner, director of communications at the Community Security Trust, an anti-Semitism watchdog, stated about the vest: "The assumption is that the designer and H&M did not mean to offend Jews. Nevertheless, fashion statements can work in diverse ways and if you randomly saw somebody wearing this in the street, then you might well believe it to be antisemitic and purchased from a neo-Nazi website or similar."
Guess only in this mad world you could be ethical and Neo-Nazi at the same time...
Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos
Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos
Comments