Fashion shouldn’t value lives, and it shouldn’t cost us our planet. Yet this is what is occurring nowadays. Globalization, fast fashion, economies of scale, social media, and offshore production have created an excellent storm for cheap, easy, and ample style consumption. And there are few signs of it slowing down: garb production has nearly doubled within the last 15 years.
With Earth Day and Fashion Revolution week upon us, style fans must reflect on how their intake undeniably has a lousy effect on each planet and people.
Fashion is rife with gender inequality, environmental degradation, and human rights abuses — all intrinsically interconnected. The Fashion Revolution campaign started because of the unresponsiveness of the style zone to the non-stop tragedies that arose inside the making of garb, including the death of 1,138 garment employees when the Rana Plaza manufacturing unit collapsed in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on April 24, 2013. Fashion Revolution aims to carry awareness of those injustices by highlighting the hands and faces of what we put on.
Fashion: Labour extensive present-day slavery
Fashion is one of the most labor-intensive industries, using at least 60 million people.
Handicraft artisan production is the second biggest agency across the Global South. India counts some 34 million handicraft artisans. Women represent the overwhelming majority of those artisans and, these days, garment people. The Global Slavery Index estimates forty million people dwell in modern slavery, many of whom are inside the Global South operating within the supply chains of Western clothing brands. Modern slavery, although no longer described in regulation, “covers a set of unique felony ideas inclusive of pressured
labor, debt bondage, pressured marriage, slavery and slavery-like practices and human trafficking.” It refers to conditions like being pressured to work overtime without being paid, children being compelled to choose cotton with the aid of the Uzbekistan government after they should be in school, ladies being threatened with violence if they don’t complete order in time, and people having their passports taken away until they work off what it cost for their transportation to carry them to the manufacturing unit, their residing quarters and meals.