Toward an Ethical Fashion Framework

Both of the authors Andres Haug and Jacob Busch are from Denmark. Haug is professor in University of Southern Denmark. His research areas are design theory and design management, primarily in the scope of industrial and fashion design. Jacob Busch is employed as a post-doctoral research assistant in the Department of Culture and Society, University of Aarhus and has recently started work on the ethics of design.

The article “Towards an Ethical Fashion Framework” is part of Fashion Theory, vol. 20 book and it´s about fashion ethics. The authors explain why fashion is a difficult concept from an environmental perspective as trends are changing rapidly and fashion items are replaced with new ones. The authors tell about the difficulties what environmental fashion experience and how people in fashion industry deal with different interpretations meaning of the ethics of fashion. The authors use charts to visualize how different factors effect towards of ethical fashion. 

The author argues that so called “providers” have the biggest responsibility to avoid ethical harms that are caused in fashion industry. Designers, producers and consumers are part of the providers group, when again environment and animals are not able to act on it. Media also plays a big part of getting the consumers to think towards to ethical fashion.  Even if research shows that ethical fashion sales figures are low, designer believe that consumers demand for ecological clothing has risen. The consumers may feel that ethical fashion product have too high price, sometimes they have difficulties to recognize the truly environmentally friendly brands and in the text has been sad that “ordinary consumers may be unwilling to adapt more environmentally friendly practices because of feeling too physically and culturally distanced from the problems in focus”.­ While well-known designers have better chance to influence how the fashion products are produced and marketed and that’s why the authors propose making ethical fashion fashionable. It would be an effective way to get consumers­ to purchase ethical fashion items. To that may affect the best high fashion producers, in which case fast fashion brands would be forced to do the same, as said in the text “The ethical profile will then be an indispensable part of what is fashionable, and if consumption follows the leading designs as has been customary, then mass fashion will follow suit.” ­

I think that the article has been written for specialist audience who are working in fashion industry, it is also good for any business who have to outsource manufacturing. The text gives also good understanding of environment issues in fashion market for general public audience. 

The article has been written in 2016 and subject is an important matter to concern. The text goes well through the Different perspectives of matter of the ethical fashion. In my opinion the authors give a really good points how fashion designers, ecpecislly high fashion producers could make diffrence by making ethical fashion fashionable, that raise the question how could high fashion designers make ethical fashion to suit their design without compromising their unique desing features? Would it be even possible to manufacture sustainable fast fashion products with the price range mass production has?­

 

Sustainable Campaign A/W16 Collection from Zara