Why I’m Not Happy Mainstream Mags Are Talking Ethical Fashion

Mainstream mags are talking ethical fashion more now than ever before. It should be good news, but here’s why I’m not happy about it

By Chere Di Boscio

A colleague of mine who has been behind a pioneering ethical fashion blog for years recently lamented that the Business of Fashion is now making videos about what she (and Eluxe) have been banging on about for years – that fashion is one of the world’s most polluting industries; that its workers are poorly paid; that the more we buy, the more polluted the planet becomes.

She expressed her confusion with the situation: on the one hand, it was great that a huge publication was shedding light on these important subjects she’d been concerned about for years. On the other hand, it was a fuck you moment: she had been there first, posting excellent content, touting excellent eco friendly fashion labels.

She had dedicated years and years to seriously investigating and researching the roots of the fashion industry, and blowing the whistle on bad practices. Why was BoF getting more shares and likes and all the credit for the insights she and others like her had spent years uncovering?

Why I’m Not Happy Mainstream Mags Are Talking Ethical Fashion

Mainstream Mags Are Talking Ethical Fashion

Buried By Giants

John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, once said of Vivienne Westwood that she’d jump on any trend if it ‘smelled of money’ – he claimed she did that with punk (by copying the torn and fetish-influenced clothes he would make after she noted they were growing popular) and that she’s now doing the same by co-opting the environmental movement.

The same kind of argument could be made for mainstream mags talking ethical fashion.

For many years, they played it safe, sticking to their major advertisers (invariably the Kering Group, owners of Bottega Veneta, Alexander McQueen and other major labels, LVMH, L’Oreal and Estee Lauder, to name a few). But once those beauty and clothing conglomerates became aware of the consumer demand for ethical garments and organic cosmetics, they started snapping up companies like Edun and Aveda. That allowed the large publishers who relied on ads from the megacorps to finally mention a few ‘green’ companies without threatening their main income base.

Thanks to Google’s algorithms favouring big publishing groups with big SEO budgets, searches for ‘ethical clothing brands’ or ‘organic beauty brands’ are likely to pull up Glamour, Elle or Vogue’s picks of the best brands – rather than the websites of the brands themselves.

Which is fine if your label is mentioned by one of the big publications. But unless it’s been snapped up by L’Oreal (who own Sanoflore and the Body Shop, for example) or Estee Lauder (who own Origins, Aveda and many other ‘green’ brands), you basically don’t exist on the web.

To illustrate, another friend of mine owns a clean beauty brand – again, a pioneer in the field. She relies on online sales for much of her business, but has been struggling to get past page 6 in Google for searches under the exact keywords ‘clean beauty brand USA’.

On a personal note, it really gets my goat that Vice and i.D. magazine even come up at all on page 1 in searches for ‘sustainable fashion magazines’ whilst a lot of great publications I follow that are actually 100% dedicated to sustainable fashion barely appear on the first 5 pages of a search.

So what can we do, and where are we going from here?

Why I'm Not Happy About Mainstream Mags Talking Ethical Fashion

The Future of Ethical Fashion

Let’s go back to the punk analogy. It started out as a radical youth movement, something rebellious, kicking against the status quo. It was a rejection of mainstream style and ethics – just like sustainable fashion is today. Then it got co-opted by those who ‘smelled money’, like Dame Westwood. Once it was fully commercialised and exploited, it became crap – posh boys with nothing much to complain about posed as punks, fashion designers sold pre-ripped ‘punk’ clothes for hundreds of dollars , and eventually the whole movement lost its relevance, turning into a watered down version of itself in the form ‘New Wave’ (hello, Duran Duran!).

The same could well happen to ethical fashion. Whilst the movement began at the grassroots level with the intention of improving the lives of garment workers and cleaning up the environment, now that there’s money to be made, its meaning and definition are becoming distorted and diluted.

Millions of dollars have been injected into what’s labelled as ‘sustainable fashion,’ but further inspection proves it’s not. Case in point? Fashion maven Miroslava Duma was just given $50 million to build a ‘sustainable’ fashion company that’s focused not on improving factory conditions or finding better ways to recycle clothing – but rather superfluous things like creating diamonds in a lab (ostensibly instead of mining them – but what about second hand gems?), and structuring real fur coats out of stem cells (instead of killing animals, is the theory – but why not just use sustainable faux fur?). Of course, this was widely heralded in the Business of Fashion and Vogue as a ‘victory for sustainable fashion’.

There are other examples of the message being hijacked by the powerful who can profit from it, too:

  • A top so-called ‘sustainable luxury’ site often written about in the likes of the New York Times recently awarded Louis Vuitton (who is one of their best clients) with a seal of ‘green’ approval for reducing its energy output, despite the fact the company uses loads of leather and fur and has been embroiled in several labour and racial discrimination scandals.
  • The spurious term ‘slow fashion’ has been applied by loads of magazines to various non-transparent, non-sustainable labels simply because they’re expensive (therefore, the logic goes, we buy them less often).
  • Judging and speaking panels for ‘sustainability summits‘ frequently include well connected figures like consultant Judy Ryan and journalist Vanessa Friedman – really nice people, yes, but they’re not actually specialists in sustainable fashion
  • Influencers like Livia Firth prefer to praise non-ethical brands for coming up with a few green items in a collection, rather than putting the spotlight on smaller brands that are always green (that’s kind of like rewarding a bully for not hitting a kid, rather than rewarding the kids who are always good!)

For me, all of this misses the original point of ethical fashion entirely. It should be about setting a fresh paradigm; out with the old (no matter what baby steps they take towards sustainability), and in with the new.

It seems that unless we, the ethical consumers, let BoF, Vogue (and other mainstream mags talking ethical fashion) know that they’re just not getting it, the ethical fashion movement will enter its ‘New Wave’ phase sooner than we think.

What are your thoughts on this article? We’d love to hear from you in the comments section, below!

Mainstream Mags Are Talking Ethical Fashion

Recommended Resources

Eco Fashion Talk – Sass Brown finds all the most gorgeous ethical fashion brands before anyone else!

The Curious Button – A great resource for budding eco fashionistas

Style with a Smile – Wonderful info on vegan fashion

Kristen Leo – The vegan YouTuber who often shares her love of thrifting and vintage shopping hauls

Peppermint Magazine – A lovely paper publication coming out of Australia

Sustainable in Stilettos – A sustainable living blog by the talented Tracey Martin

MelaninASS – A sustainable fashion site aimed at women of colour

Sasstainable – Great info on eco fashion with a special focus on kids and the family

 

Chere Di Boscio
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9 thoughts on “Why I’m Not Happy Mainstream Mags Are Talking Ethical Fashion”

  1. Hello! I just wanted to inform you that The Body Shop isn’t owned by L’Oreal anymore. It was sold to Natura, a Brazilian company, in 2017.

  2. I agree, greed and the oppression by the wealthy harm everyone. People of all ages have a need to earn money and express their artistic creativity and concerns of the environment through fashion, beauty, education, etc. Access to the world wide web opened doors that now appear to be disappearing because of unfair competition by those who already had most of everything. There is need for a remedy!

    1. Yes, agreed! Especially since the Canadian government, for example, just injected millions of dollars into ‘dinosaur’ media, because they were lagging behind new publications. It’s not at all an even playing field!

  3. This makes me frustrated and scared at the same time. Authentic genuine publications and businesses who are educating and actually care to the core are going to get undermined by bigger giant co-operations.
    Let hope there is space for us smaller people.

  4. This is such an important article. So many things that I have been mentioning to close friends and you are writing about. You talk about the genuine struggles that to the core ethical small businesses like mine have where unethical businesses are rewarded for their 0.00001% ‘ethical’ collection. Thank you for saying it like it is.

  5. Great article! This is exactly what I was talking about with a friend the other day! This … “that’s kind of like rewarding a bully for not hitting a kid, rather than rewarding the kids who are always good!” … Gosh isn’t that the truth!!

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