Is There Really Such a Thing as “Ethical Consumerism”?

You know that thing, where you say a word to yourself a couple dozen times in a row, and by the 25th repetition, the word doesn’t signify anymore? It’s just a bunch of syllables. That’s how I’ve started to feel about the phrase “ethical consumer.” Who on earth is that? Does such a person exist? I write this as one who has spent the past decade beating the drum for fashion shopping that takes matters such as environmental sustainability and labor rights into account. Last September, for instance, I brought the Bangladeshi garment worker activist Taslima Akhter with me to New York Fashion Week shows, and wrote despairingly of the disparity between the attention paid to the clothes on the runway and that given to laborers in Bangladesh, who were then agitating for a raise in their viciously low minimum wage. The subtext of these pieces is always the same: Please, for God’s sake, could someone just care?

No more. The fashion week carousel is winding up again, and I find myself reveling in a strange sort of peace, for I have decided that “ethical consumerism” is a nonsense concept. I don’t mean to say I’ve come around to a global supply chain that chews up lives and vomits landfill, or given up on the idea that ugly mass production practices can and should be changed. I’ve merely let go of my belief we can shop our way to progress.

Here’s the conundrum. Ask members of the buying public a question like, “Do you want brands to pay their workers a living wage?” and the majority of people say yes, they do want that. It may only be a bare majority; a recent survey sponsored by the Changing Markets Foundation and Clean Clothes Campaign found that 51 percent of U.S. consumers would be disinclined to buy from brands that do not pay its workers a living wage. Or so they say. Because it’s definitely not the case that 51 percent of shoppers in the United States are boycotting brands on that basis. If they were, the Garment Worker Center in Los Angeles wouldn’t have needed to launch its new campaign calling out the likes of Forever 21, Urban Outfitters, T.J. Maxx, Charlotte Russe, Marshalls, Ross, and Windsor for contracting with factories that paid about a $5–$6 hourly wage. Those factories aren’t in Bangladesh or Cambodia, mind you—they’re in L.A. Workers in other countries have it far worse, and they’re making a vastly greater quantity of our clothing. (Ross, for instance, manufactures only 5 percent of its apparel domestically, according to Garment Worker Center reps.)

So, are the members of the buying public hypocrites? I don’t think so. Are they merely misinformed? Perhaps. I’ve written before of the difficulty in figuring out where or how any of our garments were made, given that the modern, globalized supply chain is a huge Rube Goldberg contraption designed to obscure. I won’t repeat myself here, except to note that brands, themselves, can be oblivious to the source of their goods—and if they don’t know what’s up, how should we? (Case in point: Walmart was reportedly quite surprised to find its labels amid the Rana Plaza debris.) Calls for transparency are worthy, no matter what—that way lies accountability—but would perfect information serve to change the way we shop?

Let’s conduct a thought experiment. There’s total transparency in the supply chain, and I, Maya Singer, consumer highly motivated to shop “ethically,” am planning a purchase. Let’s say I want to buy a new pair of running shoes. I’ve spent two years rehabbing a bum knee and I’m champing at the bit to start training again. Do I buy one brand’s shoe made entirely from sea garbage, but in a sweatshop in Southeast Asia? Or do I buy from a brand with no environmental commitments, that produces in a unionized factory here in the USA? What if the brand that produces domestically is led by a CEO with #MeToo complaints? What if there’s another sneaker brand that’s signed a deal with Colin Kaepernick, and I like Colin Kaepernick? My point is, values compete. And ethical values lose some of their charge when they’re thrown into contention with the elemental shopping values, i.e., function, style, convenience, price. Another hypothetical: Let’s say I’ve discovered the ethically perfect running shoe. It costs $800, there’s a six-month waiting list to get a pair, they come in one color, which is crap brown, and oh, by the way, I have to buy without trying them on, so I have no way of knowing whether these particular running shoes work for, you know, my feet. Might I be forgiven for throwing my hands up and just to heading to Foot Locker, ethics be damned?

Now multiply those calculations by every purchase a person makes. Lettuce. Soap. Smartphones. Underwear. And on and on and on. What people say they want from brands, in a poll, doesn’t map precisely onto what’s available in the marketplace, and even when ethically correct products do exist, they’re not necessarily accessible or suited to a particular consumer’s needs. My beloved aunt was in great pain before she died, and there was only one pair of shoes she could walk in comfortably. I’d have sooner struck myself with a lightning bolt than told her that shoe was “unethical,” for several reasons I could have named.

“I think consumers are starting to push back against ‘responsible-ization,’ the way we’re made to feel there’s a moral choice every time we buy,” notes professor Giana Eckhardt, the head of the Centre for Research into Sustainability at Royal Holloway, University of London, and a coauthor of The Myth of the Ethical Consumer. “I think people get, on some level, that they can’t solve these complex, systemic issues just by how they shop.”

So, what is the solution, then?

I wish I knew the answer to that question. Eckhardt pleads ignorance, too. But The Myth of the Ethical Consumer, a detailed study of consumer behavior across the globe, does hold a clue. It’s in a quote from Robert Reich’s book Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life. Reich, former U.S. Labor Secretary under President Bill Clinton, writes that “there is a difference between the private wants of a consumer and the public ideals of a citizen.” I asked Eckhardt whether people might be responding to polls in the guise of “citizen.”

“Yes, I do think that’s what’s going on,” she told me. “Their answers are, you might say, aspirational—signaling what they believe about how society should work. But they don’t give anything up, with those answers. And that,” Eckhardt went on, “is the nature of a consumer transaction. You’re giving up money, you’re giving up time, you’re giving up the other product you might have purchased instead.”

Citizen vs. consumer. These roles overlap, of course. But the evidence is overwhelming that it’s been a counterproductive mistake to tell people that the primary power they have to make change is by voting with their pocketbooks. Markets don’t exist to express our will as citizens; they’re merely a means of economic exchange, with profit-seeking enterprises on one end of every transaction. Markets are subject to public policy. And it’s time to get politics—what we believe about how society should work—out of our shopping baskets, and put them back where they belong.

We, as citizens, could be advocating for all sorts of policy initiatives that push corporations to act as stewards of the places where they do business, be it establishing clear accountability throughout their supply chains, or demanding they pay their taxes where they sell their goods. That seems a better use of our time than dithering about, say, which running shoe to buy. Isn’t the goal to live in a world where all running shoes are ethical to consume?

“Regulation is the huge gap in the conversation,” notes Urska Trunk, an advisor to the Changing Markets Foundation. As she explains, the poll CMF and Clean Clothes Campaign commissioned found that vanishingly few people trust industry to self-regulate. And yet, she continues, “there just isn’t much governmental involvement in supply chain issues.”

“France has enacted due diligence legislation, requiring certain kinds of transparency,” Trunk points out, “and the U.K.’s new Modern Slavery Act is very good. But these are only a start.”

Policy change is a long-term project. But there are ways to act as citizens, in the meantime. When I chatted with Trunk, she told me about CMF’s recent campaign for clean viscose production. It was consumer pressure, she said, in the form of letters, tweets, online petitions, and so on, that convinced eight major, EU-based corporations—including H&M and Inditex, owner of Zara—to sign up to CMF’s clean viscose road map. Their participation, in turn, drove producers accounting for around 40 percent of the world’s viscose to come on board.

We act as consumers when we buy eyeglasses from Warby Parker or a zero-waste Reformation skirt. Those companies, launched with an ethical mission, connect with shoppers on the basis of a style and value proposition; the do-gooding is a bonus. We act as citizens when we threaten to withhold our business from brands that aren’t acting as good stewards. Progress requires a little—actually, quite a lot—of both.

I’d love to end this piece with a rallying cry to have everyone reading go out and form a picket line outside all the stores that source garments from Bangladesh, in solidarity with the workers there facing the imminent eviction of the Accord on Fire and Building Safety from the country. (A final decision on whether Bangladesh will be booting out Accord auditors is due later this month.) But I’m a realist. So instead, I’ll close by acknowledging that shoppers are going to shop, and on that front, I do see glimmers of hope.

Glimmer No. 1: Sustainability is becoming part of the program.

Our freedom, as consumers, is constrained by what’s available to buy. And there’s a new generation rising in the fashion industry, comprised of people committed to sustainability as a matter of course. To cite just one example: Erin Beatty, ex-designer of Suno, returns to New York Fashion Week this season with a new venture, Rentrayage, which finds her “making new clothes out of old clothes,” as she puts it. “I wanted to create a brand that’s kind to the earth and kind to the people I work with,” Beatty says, “and that can grow in a gentle way, without the objective of someday going public, and becoming gigantic.”

There are a handful of small brands, like Beatty’s, that have launched with similar aims. Meanwhile, fashion education is evolving to include sustainability in the curriculum, with students in the marketing program at Glasgow Caledonian University’s New York City campus taking courses such as Navigating Global Change: Business Practices for the Common Good. And those students are going to wind up working for big brands, and showing their employers all the ways that progressivism can be good for the bottom line.

Suno FALL 2016 READY-TO-WEAR

Glimmer No. 2: “Ethical” brands are getting smarter about, well, ethics.

In my years as a fashion journalist, I’ve been pitched too many stories to count about brands that have some kind of charity tie-in. X percent of profits go to Y cause, that kind of thing. Sometimes the charity is meaningful—it meant a lot, to me, when brands donated proceeds to Planned Parenthood after the 2016 election—but sometimes it’s dubious, offering drops in a bucket to systemically impoverished communities when oceans of reform are what’s needed. Lidia May, a new luxury handbag line, strikes me as something different, and much better.

Based in Bangladesh, and cofounded by May Yang, who moved to the country to work with an NGO, Lidia May makes sleek, top-quality bags that incorporate traditional Bangladeshi embroidery techniques. So far, so good, but also so typical. The company’s real innovation is that they’ve partnered with a local organization, the Lidia Hope Centre Trust, to train women in the high-end technique, giving them a skill they can both practice at home, a boon for mothers, and take with them when they leave the program, allowing them to pursue jobs that pay not just a living wage, but what I’d like to call a “dignity wage.” As part of the program, they also learn about nutrition, financial literacy, women’s health, and more. More than 300 women have already gone through the program.

“We’re trying to create long-term impacts,” explains Yang. “But that’s about supporting the work that the Trust is already doing, not coming in with our own ideas about what these women do or don’t need. I’d love to see lots of brands doing that—there are tons of opportunities, all over the world, for companies to identify groups doing good work in the places they operate.”

Yang notes that she and her Lidia May cofounders don’t see themselves as heading “a poverty alleviation organization”; they see themselves as a luxury handbag line, with community stewardship baked into the business model. Imagine the possibilities if the household name brands that source from Bangladesh operated this way.

Glimmer No. 3: People do care, even if they don’t know it.

I’ll preface this passage with a disclaimer: I have a conflict of interest, because Batsheva Hay, she of the must-have “Batsheva dress,” is one of my best friends. I’ve observed with amazement her brand’s emergence as a cult phenomenon, knowing that, as recently as about a year ago, she was selling most of her frocks out of her living room. A woman would see Bat on the street, wearing one of her dresses, she’d ask where it was from, and Bat would invite her over to try on the dress. There was something radical to me, in that exchange—the designer of a garment zipping a customer into a dress, encouraging her to test out the same dress in another size or a different fabric, or offering to custom-make one with shorter sleeves or a longer hem. In the era of mass production, it just didn’t seem possible that a fashion brand could run that way.

Authenticity is one of those words that’s lost meaning with overuse, but I do believe that one reason the Batsheva dress has become such an It thing is due to customers’ understanding that it’s a product with a discernible source, i.e., Batsheva. Maybe “directness” is a better word to employ. Her clothes don’t come across as having been spat out of the gigantic Rube Goldberg machine. Directness feels good to people—it’s why they desire the continued existence of their local bookstore, even though they know they could get any book they want cheaper on Amazon. It’s why they like going to restaurants where they’re regulars, and why they hate automated customer service and punch zero a hundred times in a row to get an actual human person on the line. Surrounded on all sides by bigness and complicatedness, we’re all yearning for a one-to-one exchange. It feels human. It feels honorable.

I know Bat well enough to trust that she’s got the pulse of the zeitgeist, and so it makes me optimistic that during this Fashion Week, she’ll be launching a pop-up hosting sewers on-site. Basically, she’s reconstituting her old living room setup, with the addition of seamstresses that a visitor can chat with, should she wish, as they custom-make her new Batsheva dress. Interacting with the people who make our stuff—that feels honorable, too, and of a piece with a culture that’s cheered on teacher strikes and donated to furloughed federal workers and voted through hikes to the minimum wage.

The measure of our souls isn’t to be taken in what we buy, but what we do. That said, sometimes, even to our own bafflement, we wear our hearts on our poufed sleeves.

Batsheva SPRING 2019 READY-TO-WEAR