Wear your ethics

STYLE

Worries of what to and not to wear for New Year's eve and the party season preceding it are behind us. But only to be replaced by worries about the big fashion trend/s for 2008.

But forget about hemlines, cuts, styling, this year; concentrate instead on ethical fashion. The West, weak with concern about environmental degradation, is already in the throes of promoting and buying ethical fashion.

The definition of ethical fashion varies: on one end of the spectrum there is the label Edun, launched by Bono and his wife Ali Hewson, in 2005, to be a "for-profit business founded on the premise of trade, not aid as a means of building sustainable communities". Africa is the continent of focus but the company also sources clothes from India.

On the other end are labels that make clothes from organic cotton that hasn't been bleached, or use environmentally-friendly fibre like hemp (at the butt of many jokes but now taken super-seriously), or make 100 per cent vegetarian shoes (from non-leather substances though they are not always bio-degradable, raising issues about landfills in the not-so-distant future) or shoe company Terra Plana which designs its products from recycled materials.

The idea is simple: make fashion, long considered to be a big culprit in the way people spend wastefully, more environmentally sensitive and less wasteful.

Fashion loves a new trend and if it has a heart, so much the better. The British edition of Vogue carried a spread in 2005 of ethically made fashion products.

Other mainstream international publications too have carried features on ethical fashion. And it all looks good, trendy and no one, unless you choose to tell them, need know if your shorts are made from hemp or some other material.

This brings me to the crux of what I want to say: why haven't Indian fashion designers and the larger premium clothing industry gone down this route yet?

If Edun and other trendy labels can source out of India, why can't our local and the premium international brands selling here and wanting a piece of our economic growth bring ethical fashion in the same mainstream way it has been done in the US and the UK? Is it just laziness "" why bother in a market that hasn't yet woken up to the trend? Or is it the argument, the old and tired one, of not having the scale to make it viable from a business point of view?

To my mind, the answer is self-evident: the fashion industry has no choice but to wake up to this change in the way the consumer is going to be buying fashion this year.

Even if the Indian consumer isn't that aware now, it is a matter of time before he/she starts demanding ethical fashion, and labels that don't offer it will be judged poorly. Maybe for the next fashion week, FDCI could consider sensitising its members to this trend.