People & power
Garment workers' and models' rights, representation in the ethical-fashion movement, and the rules changing the industry.
- Does ethical fashion have a white savior complex? Power and representation in the movement
An essay on who speaks, who decides and who benefits in ethical fashion: the geography of production and consumption, how garment workers are portrayed, artisan partnerships, second-hand clothing exports, and what a more equal movement would look like.
- Does sustainable fashion need a reboot? From green products to fewer, fairer clothes
An essay on why a decade of sustainable-fashion marketing has not reduced the industry's footprint, and what a reboot would involve: producing less, regulating claims and waste, paying workers, and making repair and reuse the norm.
- The Women Series: the work that keeps clothes in use
A series of profiles of the jobs at the heart of circular fashion, from tailors and menders to resale entrepreneurs, natural dyers, textile sorters and garment-worker organisers: what each role involves, the skills it takes, and how to support it.
- The best of NYFW and other fashion weeks: what sustainable progress to watch for
How to watch New York Fashion Week, or any fashion week, with a sustainability lens: what counts as real progress on the runway and behind it, from materials and show production to models' working conditions and the minimum standards some weeks now require.
- The personal is political: a history of the fight for garment workers' rights
Why what we wear is a labour issue: who makes clothes, the Rana Plaza collapse and the Bangladesh Accord, California's Garment Worker Protection Act (SB 62), due diligence laws, and what shoppers, brands and governments can do.
- What is an ethical modeling agency? Models' labour rights and the questions to ask
Models are workers too. The common problems in the modeling industry (debt, late pay, high commissions, harassment, pressure on bodies, digital replicas), the laws that now address them in New York and France, and a checklist of what an ethical agency does.
