Our Social Power
It has been a grateful experience attending to the ‘Better Lives’ lectures during the last two weeks. We are living within a society plenty of technological distractions and in a world where we don’t take sustainable responsability anymore, consuming our natural resources in an brutal way and not respecting our flora and fauna. I found really interesting that experts in Sustainability and Social Responsability could share their experiences with us and we could learn more in depth about it, as a fashion practicioners we should take our personal responsability as a part of our day by day. I found particulary interesting the ‘Power’ lecture, by Julia Crew.
Julia connected the sustainable and social current concerns and the way we can help to change them through using our personal ‘power’. First of all, she explained to us how different could be our personal concept of ‘Power’ and the different ways it can be generally understood. Personally, the most shocking point of the lecture was when she spoke about Power and Money, explaining to us the dramatic salary difference between a Bangladeshi worker and a CEO from one of the top five fashion brands. We all should stop contributing with the labour exploitation in Bangladesh and in other developing countries. Sadly, it is something really hard to change. Nowadays, loads of Fashion brands perform their textile productions on that way, and the ones which are concerned about social responsability and would pay a decent salary to their workers, would require to increase the price of their clothes. Probably that would mean that their sales would fall.
On this point, What could we do to improve the situation as a fashion consumers? And, What could we do as Fashion practitioners? From my point of view, the first thing we need as a consumers is information. We should know where all our clothes have been made, seeking some information before we become buyers and avoiding to contribute with those brands which have violated the human rights performing their productions. In terms of being more conscious about the ‘Fast Fashion’ situation, we could have a previous thought before shopping about what we really need, or the amount of clothes we already have. Sometimes we buy goods that are not really necessary for us. We could also contribute with the ‘Second Hand’ market, selling the clothes that we are not using anymore and buying new ones which somebody has used already.
Regarding our Fashion Practitioners view, we should be aware of the origin of the materials, products and fabrics we use. In a second stage, It would be great if we all dedicate a part of our practice to inform the Society about what is going on in terms of Sustainability and Fashion Responsability, at the same time we destine a bit of our outcomes to social causes related with the current Fashion problems.