Golden chance to put the brakes on fast fashion
IF you are over the age of 18, you may not have heard of Boohoo until this week’s allegations of modern slavery.
They sell skimpy clothes for nubile young women, the kind your mother would have called “tarty”, as she warned “you’ll catch your death in that”.
In short, the clothes we would all be wearing now if our youthful allure hadn’t migrated south.
Boohoo said on Monday it was investigating claims that staff at one of its Leicester factories were paid as little as £3.50 an hour and were working without proper equipment to guard against Covid-19.
The firm, which owns the Nasty Gal and Pretty Little Thing brands, saw shares tumble by 25 per cent, wiping £1.3billion off its value.
The stock market was stunned, the company promised to investigate, Priti Patel became terribly woke and was “appalled”, and girls who buy their products took advantage of a whopping 70 per cent sale.
Its bosses are naturally gutted, as they were in line for a £150million bonus if shares in the online fashion retailer rose by two-thirds over the next three years.
Ain’t capitalism great, if you don’t happen to be working in a sweatshop on starvation wages?
The only really shocking element of the Boohoo scandal is that the alleged sweatshops are in the UK but even then, it has been well-known that such hellholes have always existed in textile centres like Leicester.
And it shouldn’t matter to us whether it’s child labour in Cambodia or a poor woman in Leicester who is being exploited.
Sadly we do care more when it’s close to home, especially given Leicester became such a cluster for Covid-19 that it had to go into local lockdown as it was deemed a high risk in the spread of the disease. Business has been booming for Boohoo during the pandemic, producing lines of comfort wear and even trendy masks.
It should have been pretty obvious that somewhere in the world a garment worker was still hunched over a sewing machine in the middle of Covid-19, meeting the demand for clothes to watch the telly in.
And given a dress from Boohoo’s site can be snapped up at less than a tenner, we all knew that same garment maker was paying the real price with her sweat.
Like many of us who love clothes, lockdown has opened my eyes to all the wasted cash and hours I spent shopping.
I haven’t bought an item of clothing since lockdown and yet miraculously have not been forced to sit around with only my knickers for cover.
Fast fashion is the main contributor to the 92million tonnes of waste created by the clothing industry every year. The way our clothing is made also uses trillions of tonnes of water, many harmful chemicals and emits more than 1.7billion tonnes of CO2.
By slowing down in this pandemic, we have surely realised that fast fashion is a luxury we don’t need and garment workers can’t afford in terms of hardship and toil.
We are heading into the worst recession in living memory, an employers’ market where exploitation in the name of corporate greed will be rife.
As consumers, our buying power does give us a role because only when we reduce the demand for fast fashion will people cease to be exploited in its supply.