Minister calls for the end of 'fast fashion'
12/10/2007
One of the United Kingdom's ministers for the environment, Joan Ruddock, has criticised the trend for "fast fashion", the practice of buying cheap clothes with the intention of wearing them very few times before throwing them away.
She told a conference on sustainbale textiles in London: "Fast fashion is unsustainable. People want to wear clothes that look like the ones the stars wear, and retailers make them accessible. But fast fashion comes at a great cost because cheap clothes are going into the bin, and from there into landfill or into an incinerator after they've been worn once or twice."
Ms Ruddock said there was a need for new thinking, with more ethical trading and a greater focus on sustainability. She praised an initiative that major retailer Marks & Spencer has initiated to encourage consumers to wash clothes at 30 degrees whenever possible, and she also spoke in complimentary terms of clothes she had seen in sustainable fibres including hemp and bamboo.
"I've seen beautiful garments that were incredibly soft and in amazing colours," she continued, "and I look forward to seeing this niche market move into the mainstream."
She said her department had drawn up a 'sustainable clothing roadmap' as part of a broader 'sustainable consumption' project the government was engaged in, saying it would highlight and share best practice in this arena and celebrate success.
Fast fashion is the invention of Inditex, parent company of retail brands such as Zara. Last year, a scandal involving child labour at some of Zara's footwear suppliers in Portugal did nothing to stop the group growing earnings by 25% and profits by 23%.
Asked by sportstextiles.com if the minister really thought her department's 'roadmap' might do a better job of encouraging consumers to give up fast fashion than a child labour scandal, she said that her ambitions for the initiative were more modest. But she added: "Action is being taken across the European Union as a whole on sustainability and our roadmap is a part of that. We can do useful work and inform our partners of our findings so that the work we do here can be taken up elsewhere. This is a global issue. We're not saying fast fashion will stop, we're just trying to add to the information mix."
She accepted that Inditex's success had as a starting point its determination to make stylish affordable clothes available to women who were going out to work, often for the first time and nearly always on low salaries, in Spain in the 1980s, which she said was a good thing. However, she said that consumers, on the whole, had become more wasteful.
"Fast fashion suggests to me—with this attitude of 'buy, throw away'—that people now have money to throw away," she said.
She was speaking at an event set up by the RITE Group, a new, not-for-profit industry association that aims to promote the sustainable and ethical production of textiles and clothing throughout the global supply chain.
Share this story:
