Can Fashion Clean Up Its Act?

In the wake of Bangladesh’s Rana Plaza disaster, consumers are showing new interest in brands that do right by their workers.

No matter how many people switch to thrift store shopping or donning dresses stitched by a local designer, fast fashion isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. But big retailers such as H&M operate on such a large scale that even small improvements in their way of doing business can have a seismic impact. H&M, for example, is now the world’s largest consumer of organic cotton. Big brands also have the marketing budgets and know-how to translate ethical fashion for the lay consumer. To the uninitiated, ethical fashion can be overwhelming, an umbrella concept that might include safe working conditions, fair-trade artisanship or domestic production, not to mention the environmental implications, from the use of nontoxic dyes to recycled materials and biodegradable packaging.

Read more at The Nation:  http://www.thenation.com/article/175317/can-fashion-clean-its-act#ixzz2aScp91p1
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Written by: Elizabeth Cline
Elizabeth Cline is a New York–based journalist and the author of Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion.