How little is too little to pay for a T-shirt?
Boohoo may be in the dock for its alleged reliance on sweatshops, but are we really surprised? Surely it doesn’t take Philip Green to work out that if you charge £3 for something that takes 30 minutes to make, using fabrics, dyes or bleaching from across the globe, and then transport it across the planet and pay the incurred import duties, then someone and something (the planet) is getting a bad deal.
Yet for years we’ve allowed the seeding and flourishing of a pernicious idea – that caring about the rights of the lowest paid and the environment is somehow elitist the moment it comes with a realistic price-tag.
The problem is lack of transparency. A high-priced T-shirt ought to guarantee high ethical standards, but doesn’t necessarily. So consumer trust breaks down. Luxury becomes a meaningless marketing cliché and the notion that all expensive clothes are a rip off persists in some circles. Just as the perception that anything
cheap is automatically dodgy remains immutable among other, more affluent groups.
Leather is an even deeper quagmire. The £1,200 bag is deeply offensive to those who think we should somehow be limited to spending our money on the things that they find acceptable. Yet that £12.99 Saint Laurent knock-off is wrong in so many ways. If it’s plastic, it’s destined for imminent landfill. If it’s leather, you probably don’t want to know about the conditions of the animals and humans involved in its production.
Sooner or later though, we’ll all have to. Brands are slowly inching towards labelling that can provide consumers with at least as much information as the food industry offers. Sometimes they may have to give us too much information.
At Chanel, for instance, they’ve banned exotic skins because they couldn’t find
suppliers who met their standards. This move didn’t come because customers demanded enlightenment, Bruno Pavlovsky, Chanel’s president of fashion, tells me, but from the company and its teams who discovered things about the way alligators and crocodiles are farmed that left them queasy.
It isn’t easy. There aren’t as yet the fashion equivalent of calorie counters. But there are brands such as the American Everlane that have committed themselves to complete transparency and ethical practices. Its T-shirts, incidentally, cost $25 (and £23 in the UK. Before you cry foul, those import duties are contributing to the UK’S depleted coffers).
Twenty-three pounds will seem an outrage to those hooked on the three for a tenner model, but perhaps it’s a useful benchmark. When I asked Jane Shepherdson, the woman responsible for Topshop’s golden era, the lowest responsible price a dress could sell for, she suggested £20 – but that would be for an ultra simple design, with no details. Perhaps if sewing classes were brought back to the mainstream curriculum, we’d have a better instinct of all of this.
Meanwhile, brands at both ends of the price spectrum need to lead the way and educate us. If we know how many calories and grams of sugar or fat there are in a yogurt, shouldn’t we also know about the carbon footprint of a T-shirt or pair of jeans?