Fashion is both a reflection of and a catalyst for social change, and can play a crucial role in social justice. Social justice in fashion considers fair distribution of resources, the elimination of institutionalised domination and oppression, and the consequences of fashion decisions made in one place on another, and by one generation over those yet to be born.
The story of fashion and the story of the many fashions that make up our lives stem from a variety of influences and also personal references. Culture also plays a huge role, for some more than others. our fashion developed against a backdrop of varied street styles, music influences, and contemporary fashion scenes. some, develop a taste in multiple styles of fashion and clothing influenced by varied Western street styles alongside other culture diaspora styles, too. for example British Indians.
So what might an intersectional approach to fashion look like? How might fashion centre the stories of fashion beyond Europe and of the producers alongside designers?what do we know about the work of design activists and movements that challenge inequalities in fashion, such as unfair labour practises and cultural appropriation, as a way for students to reimagine fashion. This approach leads to questions of ethics, social justice, accountability, appropriation, indigenization, and decolonization.
Such an approach echoes what theorist Arturo Escobar calls a design for the pluriverse. The term pluriverse, originally used by the Zapatistas, the Mexican revolutionary political and militant group, envisions a decolonial political world in which many worlds coexist and thus destabilises the concept of universality that has historically justified processes of colonial domination. The notion of the pluriverse acknowledges the entanglements and interconnectedness between different ways of being in the world, and Escobar argues is a way to regenerate people's spaces, their cultures and communities, and to reclaim the commons.
So, what's more fashionable, London's Bond Street or for example Ealing Road, home to South Asian fashions in West London? The question is used as prompt to explore examples of marginalised forms of fashion practise that originate from the global South and show alternative counter-hegemonic ways of making fashion. While both areas have stalls with high-end luxury fashions, the fashions are very different. In Ealing Road, saris, a pre-colonial garment in the form of unstitched cloth, dominates the storefronts.
These discussions also open space to discuss more sustainable and social-justice-oriented ways of making fashion, such as the Sari for Change brand that trains low-income communities to recycle saris, to historical examples, such as the London-based campaign group Sari Squad, a group of women, mainly of South Asian origin, who wore saris as a form of visible protest against far-right racist groups in the UK in the 1980s.
This can lead us to question how an alternative social-justice-oriented fashion design might address how colonialism and imperialism is about economic exploitation and dominance, and to understand why the Westernised fashion system operates to maintain cultural hierarchies. This involves a much deeper critical examination of how power operates globally in fashion to create and sustain racist and sexist hierarchies, and the role of coloniality thinking that established a justification for some, mainly European, countries to appropriate the land and resources of other countries.
Through this analysis, the fashion community can focus on three urgent issues. Firstly, how the option to decolonize fashion is more than about racial diversity. It's a long-term process to find ways for fashion colleges, fashion brands, and consumers to expose and offer alternatives to Eurocentric ideas about fashion. To do this, fashion needs to learn not just from designers, but also vernacular, everyday forms of fashion alongside grassroot activists to focus on ethical and environmental issues in fashion.
Secondly, it's more than about acknowledging colonial paths. To decolonize fashion requires moving towards alternative, anti- racist, and non-capitalist forms of fashion-design practise by learning with and from the global South. And thirdly, and most importantly, we need to decide whether we can even reform fashion-design cultures and practises, given the harm they are currently causing people and the planet, or whether we should be transforming and reimagining the fashion-design process altogether.
Journalist and campaigner Tansy Hoskins has explored the capitalist and patriarchal roots of fashion-design manufacturing, production, and consumption, and calls for a revision of the entire fashion-design system. And design theorist Sasha Costanza- Chock outlines the need for design justice, a design approach led by marginalised groups to challenge universalist design principles and practises.
So we need to urgently rethink fashion away from industry and towards people's lived experiences as a way to encourage a more relational and human approach to fashion, designing with people's differences to include everybody's fashion stories. It's only through doing this that a reorientation of fashion design towards a more ethical and political practise can be achieved. For fashion design to learn from rather than exploit marginalised and subaltern groups, it must create and offer spaces in which heterogeneous concepts of fashion can thrive and flourish.
There is an urgent need to explore alternative non-extractive, anti-racist and social justice-oriented forms of fashion design pedagogies.
ENVIRONMENTAL INJUSTICE
GHANA
An estimated 15 million items of unwanted clothing from the UK, Canada, USA, China, South Korea, Australia and other countries pour into Ghana each week.
Whilst Ghana is not the only country where unwanted clothing is ‘dumped’, what is happening in Ghana offers a stark example of environmental injustice.
These clothes are commonly known as obroni wawu – dead white man’s clothes. Secondhand clothes imports have created environmental disasters in Ghana, as well as severe health risks for the people who live and work around the related markets and landfill sites. The term ‘waste colonialism’ was first used at the Basel Convention in 1989, to describe the transboundary disposal of hazardous and toxic wastes.
https://eco-age.com/resources/decolonising-fashion-dead-white-mans-clothes-ghana/
Most of the items of clothing arrive at Kantamanto Market, the second largest secondhand market in West Africa. The market creates jobs for many people, and provides a space for entrepreneurs and styles. Products are curated, upcycled and, in some cases, sold back to other countries ‘with a little Ghanaian flair’.
The market is also the site of backbreaking work for the female head porters, called kayayei, who carry the massive bales of clothes on their heads and risk serious injury.
Around six million items of the clothing leave the market as waste each week to be dumped. The destination of the majority of clothing waste from Kantamanto Market was, until 2019, Kpone landfill. More than 60% of the waste in this landfill site is estimated to be clothing. Waste pickers and the communities faced nausea, headaches, drowsiness, fatigue and respiratory problems, originating from the site.
The clothing waste began to overwhelm Kpone landfill within five years. Then, in August 2019, Kpone went up in flames, creating further respiratory problems, emitting noxious fumes and creating increasingly dangerous working environments for waste pickers. The site burned for 11 months.
The landfill site was decommissioned and capped in 2020, displacing over 300 waste pickers and levelling their community space.
Clothing waste in legal and illegal dumping continues to cause devastating problems in Ghana. It will continue to do so for as long as it takes the polyester, viscose and acrylic to decompose.
There isn’t capacity to transport all this clothing waste to new landfill sites, so it ends up in the streets. Here it creates environments for pests and disease to thrive. This clothing waste blocks the drainage and water systems, and damages the city’s ability to deal with life-threatening floods. Once the clothing has made its way to the ocean, it washes up in tangled knots of clothing or gets clogged up in the sand, up to 15 feet deep.
Challenges and opportunities for human rights defenders in global fashion supply chains
This needs to be changed. And these changes can come when workers are united, when workers are fighting for their lives together one of the best tools for this is a union. Forming unions and joining with a union makes them united and strong, and their collective voice can bring the changes.
The unions are important because, in many cases, the laws of the country are not enforced. For example in Bangladesh there is a labour law, though it's not adequate or often enforced because there is a power collusion between business and politics.
if there is a strong union in the factory, they can do the collective bargaining agreement with their respective factory management over the demands they have. And sometimes that agreement can be even beyond the law. for example living on poverty wages, but through the union agreement, if workers give a demand to receive a living wage, that can be discussed.
Fashion Checkerhttps://fashionchecker.org
Union's are also important if women workers are willing to discuss gender-based violence during their collective bargaining agreement. It t can be discussed, and resolution can come to set up a committee in the factory and resolve all these problems and eliminate all the gender-based violence from the respective factories so that it would be a women-friendly workplace.
When they defeated however, they still stand back up and fight did they start to win. Through a collective voice, through a union voice and union collective agreement, a change can become. A change is possible.
Clean Clothes Campaign: Amplifying worker voices in the garment and sportswear industry
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