How Fashion is the key to change and improvement
In Fashion, every single person involved in the process of making clothes to wearing them has an essential role. It goes from the Designer, to the people who are making the clothes, to those who are selling them, to the consumer,… Unfortunately, important inequalities regarding the salaries are often (indeed all the time) observed, obviously depending on which position the person occupies. Designers get the higher salaries and their work is as important as everyone else’s but the conditions in which the clothes makers work and the salaries they get need to be changed. This is what it is about : raising awareness and so starting to provoke change partially by giving my opinion.
Are you happy with what you have or do you always need more?
In today’s society everything is made for people to consume more and more. In order to feel happy, people feel this need to buy new things as often as possible. The problem with that way of consuming? We are never truly satisfied. We are happy with our new acquirement for a few weeks or even days only and we always end up feeling like we are missing something and feel this urgent need to buy new things. But are all those things necessary to our well-being?
When we think about the process of making clothes, we think of the people who are making them. But unfortunately, these people are most of the time underpaid and can’t buy the quarter of what most of us possess and sometimes can’t even pay for their basic needs like food and warm clothes. It is time for them to feel as happy as we are when we buy new clothes, but by allowing them to survive and work in better conditions. It is time to ask ourselves if we really need everything we buy and what we could do to help ameliorate the clothes makers’ situation. Fashion is, in my opinion, the solution to this problem. But this is in our hands as well. We could start thinking more about what we’re buying, why and where we are buying it from. Fashion journalists and interviewers could start asking Designers and brands how much are their employees paid to make them realise that people are starting to be aware of this problem and that they need to change things. On the other hand, those who are giving their employees good work conditions and salaries could also talk about it and how they did it through Instagram, blogs,… I think that the best way of making change happen is awareness. It is people working in Fashion that mostly have the opportunity to ameliorate the situation and help these people for example by organising a fashion show with clothes realised by the models themselves or even recycled clothes to show that without clothes makers, Fashion is nothing and they deserve and need better salaries and work conditions.
To conclude, think twice before buying something. Do you really need it? Do you know about the company’s employees’ work conditions and salaries? That is now what I’ll start to think about before buying clothes. Every small step counts.
References :
Rogaten, J. (2020) ‘Well – being’ (Lecture). Better lives, London College of Fashion, 17th February.
Kuronuma, Y. (2016) Available at : https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/India-hopes-to-overtake-Bangladesh-Vietnam-in-garment-exports (Accessed : 02.21.20).