Fashion in ‘crisis’: consumer activism and brand (ir)responsibility in lockdown

ABSTRACT

The Covid-19 pandemic precipitated an ‘existential crisis’ in the global fashion industry. The effects of the crisis on the retail sector resulted in many brands deferring or cancelling orders from supplier factories without paying workers, which had an instant and calamitous impact on the lives of garment workers in the global South. While activist organizations were quick to launch campaigns demanding that fashion brands #PayUp and take responsibility for their producers, these calls seemed futile in the face of fashion supply chains that have long been structured in ways that absolve brands of responsibility. The stories of worker exploitation and abuse in the garment industry that emerged during the pandemic were not discussed as effects of global capitalism, but rather were recast as evidence of a world suddenly in ‘crisis.’ In this article, we reflect on how the language of ‘crisis’ adopted in the early months of the pandemic produced particular modes and instruments of (ir)responsibility. We present an analysis of the effects of the pandemic on the global fashion industry, as well as the #PayUp and #WeWearAustralian campaigns, and argue that the exceptionalism underpinning the crisis discourse has both diffused and narrowed responsibility for garment worker exploitation, reiterating the very racialised inequalities that allow such exploitation to occur in the first place.

KEYWORDS:

• Consumer activism
• crisis
• ethical consumption
• fashion
• responsibility

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Further information

This Special Issue article has been comprehensively reviewed by the Special Issue editors, Associate Professor Ted Striphas and Professor John Nguyet Erni.

Notes

1 Improved industry transparency since the Rana Plaza factory collapse has been a result of efforts by labour rights groups, consumer activism and the visibility brought to this issue by garment workers themselves. Regular protests by garment workers in Bangladesh have demanded greater accountability from fashion brands, including compensation for Rana Plaza victims and increased wages. Alongside these movements, activist groups such as Fashion Revolution, and labour rights organisations such as Clean Clothes Campaigns have been mobilising consumers and lobbying fashion brands to improve transparency.

2 In a recent survey by the Business Human Rights Centre (2020c), 29 out of 55 fashion brands reported profits since the onset of the pandemic.

3 Organisations included Labour Behind the Label, the Clean Clothes Campaign and Remake.

4 The actions include brands’ commitment to ‘engaging with financial institutions, governments and donors’ without detailing the nature of this engagement, and to ‘strongly support access to relief funds’ without providing such support themselves (ILO 2020, p.2).

5 One high profile example is the resignation of Yael Aflalo, the founder and former-CEO of sustainable fashion brand, Reformation. Although the brand, like many others in 2020, embraced the BlackLivesMatter hashtag, the testimonies of black employees highlighted the ways in which racism was embedded in the brand’s operations and ethos (Nesvig 2020).

6 Similar reports have emerged of Bangladeshi garment workers, including pregnant women (Politzer 2020), and garment workers in Los Angeles (Miller 2020) being forced to work despite the risks of Covid-19 within overcrowded factories.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rimi Khan

Dr Rimi Khan is a Lecturer in the School of Communication and Design at RMIT University Vietnam. Her research is broadly concerned with creativity, diverse citizenship and cultural economy. Her most recent work examines creative labour and ethical fashion economies in Asia. Her book, Art in Community: The Provisional Citizen (2016, Palgrave), examines the institutional, aesthetic, and economic agendas that make communities creative, cohesive and productive.

Harriette Richards

Dr Harriette Richards is an Honorary (Fellow) in the School of Culture and Communication and Research Associate in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. She is currently working on research investigating radical transparency in the fashion industry and gendered dynamics in the innovation sector as well as a monograph about fashion and the settler colonial imagination. She is co-founder, with Professor Natalya Lusty and Dr Rimi Khan, of the Critical Fashion Studies research group.