Consumer Power!

I've seen the corpses: it's a cost I don't think anyone should pay for a £6 skirt




By LIZ HOGGARD
With high-street chains using cheap labour abroad to slash prices, fashion has become an ethical issue. Here, Safia Minney, head of green style label People Tree, gives Liz Hoggard the lowdown on the industry's dirty tricks and the real reason Jane Shepherdson left Topshop.
'SOME people think nothing of spending £600 on a handbag, then boast about spending only £6 on a Primark dress," Safia Minney, founder of ethical fashion label People Tree, tells me. "But it is changing. Where the average British woman once didn't fuADVERTISEMENTlly understand the whole labour rights issue behind fast [mainstream] fashion, she is now beginning to."

Once upon a time, eco fashion was all sludgy colours and hairy textures. But today Minney is looking radiant in a bright pink dress by the cult New York designer Thakoon. The Fairtrade cotton dress - designed exclusively for People Tree - is part of People Tree's new designer collection.

It's been a remarkable year for the label, voted one of Britain's coolest green brands by Vogue this month. Sales are growing by 40 per cent a year. Its clothes are stocked by Topshop and Timberland. Although it spends little on marketing and never pays celebrities to wear its clothes, you'll see Sienna Miller, Lily Cole and Minnie Driver in People Tree dresses.

And this summer Minney pulled off the fashion coup of the year by signing ex-Topshop supremo Jane Shepherdson as a consultant for the label. In fashion terms, People Tree is a minnow (this year's turnover will be £4 million) but this move left rivals reeling. Minney says Shepherdson will bring a funkier vibe to the collection. "Jane will keep pushing the boundaries forward with Fairtrade fashion. So we can provide livelihoods not just for 2,000 people, but hopefully for 20,000." Shepherdson has just appointed a new head designer for the label: Carole Robb, formerly of Boden and Monsoon.

We meet at the label's east London HQ, an airy loft space full of rails of wispy dresses and sculptural, ruffled shirts. Minney knows Fairtrade won't work if it's not gorgeous. Her core customers are female and aged 25 to 40. "Women tend to be the green consumers," she says.

Minney may be glamorous, but she is also uncompromising when it comes to labour rights. She believes we should put pressure on high-street chains to ensure workers are protected in factories in developing countries. "What's really exciting is that kids are now questioning the ethics of fast fashion. Whether it's my daughter of 11, or my son who's 14, there's a sense of: 'That ra-ra skirt at £2.50, it's less than a sandwich, isn't it mum? How do they make it?'"

For Minney to preach about the rights and wrongs of buying dirt-cheap clothes is easy. She is married to a wealthy banker, James, and never has to worry about clothing her children. Yet few can sniff at what she has achieved: a large number of her 63-strong staff, both here and in Japan, defected from international fashion companies, including an ex-manager from Ralph Lauren. "People are really cheesed off with incredibly short lead times, they're fed up with shouting at suppliers on the phone to deliver in unreasonable time frames, with terms and penalties that they know will undermine the person they're talking to. They want to work with integrity."

It is, she says, common practice for designers to cut up or burn a collection at the end of the season to maintain the brand value.

Her other great achievement, of course, is bagging Shepherdson. When she left Topshop last October, people assumed Shepherdson was piqued by her boss Philip Green's decision to give Kate Moss a design contract. But I couldn't help noticing she left shortly before a major investigation alleged that Green's clothing empire, Arcadia, used Third World sweatshops where migrant employees worked 70-hour weeks for 40p an hour. Green denied the allegations, asserting that the factories complied with Arcadia's code of practice.

Was Shepherdson (and Topshop's MD Karyn Fenn, who subsequently quit) sick of exploitative industry practices? Certainly Minney says they had talks about her joining the company a year and a half ago. "We met at the launch of the Fairtrade cotton mark in February 2006. At that point I suggested to her that we work together. We just corresponded, and she said, 'I'll come in for a cup of coffee,' and was very happy to come and help."

Minney knows first-hand the horror of the sweatshop. Accidents happen when corners are cut to keep prices down and employers flout basic health and safety regulations. "In 2005 I was in Bangladesh when the Spectrum factory collapsed. It was about 30 kilometres from the centre of Dhaka, and one of the contracted factories that was working and producing for Zara and other European brands. Seventy-four workers were killed and hundreds trapped under debris after the nine-storey building collapsed."

Poorly constructed on swampland, the building had been approved for four storeys, not nine. Previous worker complaints about cracks in the factory walls went ignored. After the tragedy, Inditex (Zara's parent company) ended up paying compensation to the families of the dead.

So people are dying to make a £6 skirt? She pauses carefully: "Having seen the pictures of crushed and bloody corpses in and around Dhaka, it's a cost I don't think anyone should be expected to pay just to make a skirt." By contrast, People Tree is all about using fashion as a development tool to help people on the bottom of the economic pyramid. It pays 50 per cent advance payments on orders so that small groups can trade. Its lead times are six to eight months, rather than the typical four to six weeks. The idea is for workers to be able to stay in their villages with their families, rather than move to the city and work in sweatshops. "It's about quality of life, in the same way it is for you and me," says Minney.

She has always been interested in green spending. "When I was 25 and got engaged, it was in the middle of the anti-apartheid movement, so you wouldn't buy your engagement ring with diamonds and gold from South Africa. You'd go to an antique store instead." It's not the kind of dilemma most of us grapple with, but Minney is in a privileged position. She married James and in 1989 they relocated to Japan because of his work. "I wanted to carry on buying organic food, being vegetarian, shopping for clothes in second-hand shops and recycling. But back then Japan was a very corporate, consumerist society. There was a stigma attached to any kind of green work."

It was very much a homegrown business. She went into labour with her son just after a shipment of Fairtrade goods had arrived from Bangladesh. And she took two days' maternity leave with both children. In 1997, she launched her People Tree fashion collection, using eco textiles. She designed the leaflets and catalogues, and even modelled the lingerie.

People Tree operated from her home for the first nine years. In 2001, they launched the label in the UK. Shoppers were starting to get to grips with Fairtrade and organic food, but the concept of an ecologically sound jumper was still radical. By 2004 it had a range in London's fashion-forward Selfridges store, which also stocks the likes of Alexander McQueen, Prada and Marc Jacobs. Prices are very accessible (T-shirts £12, dresses from £38). And the clothes are beautifully crafted. Minney hoots with triumph as I stand up and two buttons drop off my own (mass-produced) dress. "This makes me so excited to see because, you know, we struggle in the villages to make everything just right, and then you go into - I won't say where - and the buttonholes are tatty and it's selling for 400 quid."

Minney is convinced there is a growing hunger for Fairtrade fashion. Not only are consumers shocked by the dirty, unglamorous side of fashion, but clothes are a sensual pleasure: we want to know their provenance. "Consumer power is our only salvation, it really is," she says.

• www.peopletree.co.uk.




The full article contains 1394 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.Page 1 of 1


Source: The Scotsman
Location: Edinburgh