Home Truth

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus told the people around him not to worry about their lives: what to eat, what to drink, what to wear. Two thousand years on and we are still more preoccupied about these things than anything else. What to wear. What not to wear. We are what we eat. Bad food. Good food. Superfood. The media has capitalised on this preoccupation big time.

Even the youngest of my children care about what they wear. Although for different reasons. My five year old cares most about comfort, absence of irritating labels and Spiderman logos. When buying clothes, my teenager struggles with balancing peer pressure and advertising against a modest allowance entering an ever-decreasing bank account. The one who cares least is my husband (and always has. Our oldest child was asking me last night “if Dad was so seriously uncool when I met him that he was so far off the bottom of the scale that he came back round to the supercool top!”): he’ll wear whatever is clean and still fits!

We have all been horrified by stories of sweatshops and child labour. I read an article about cotton farming recently in New Consumer magazine that truly appalled me. But the quality and design of ethical clothing through the years has done so little to inspire me. Mind you, what an awful uphill struggle designers and producers must have. Constantly changing fashion trends. Shops so cheap you can completely revamp your wardrobe for £100. Massive advertising budgets subliminally conditioning us to want what they have to offer.

It works. It certainly takes a better person than me to say that they own an ethical wardrobe.

But I think things are changing. Marks and Spencers have a new organic cotton range. New mail order companies are springing up all the time, offering ethical alternatives to the latest trends. Even the la Redoute catalogue that I buy from has a couple of fair trade pages and the skirt I bought recently is getting lots of compliments! Fair trade outfits are a must for hip celebrities with a conscience they want everyone to see.

New Consumer magazine has a list of ethical clothing stores. Get hold of it and have an evening surfing the net. Shopping for clothes with a clear conscience - now that must be a first!

Filed under: Uncategorized on March 20th, 2007