module 1 - fashion evolution

Notes on what my zine will consist of

• by 2030, the industry could reach a standstill — with natural resources becoming so jeopardised that any move towards a more sustainable future will be near impossible.
•  over 218 million children are hard at work — 73 million of those are working in hazardous conditions that "directly endangers their health, safety, and moral development.
• While it's much easier to track the life of clothing once it's already made, retracing its origins is another story. That's why transparency, at every level, is crucial. 
• I want to look into how fast fashion has not only effected the planet and how much environmental damage it has had over many years but also how fast fashion could not happen without sweatshops, child labours and unfair wages. Fast fashion is happening on such a mass scale because clothes are being made so cheaply and becoming so readily available, even some couture and designer clothing bought by consumers for thousands are still made in sweatshops. 
• Cheap retailers such as Primark, Tesco and Asda are generally held up as the villains of the industry: accused of driving wages and working conditions down through their desire to sell clothes at extraordinarily cheap prices. 
• One striking finding from the report is that the gap between legal minimum wages (the legal minimum a person can be paid) and minimum estimates for living wages (the minimum pay rate needed for a person to lead a decent life) tended to be “even larger in Europe’s cheap labour countries than in Asia”.
• In Croatia for example, the report says suppliers for Benetton and Hugo Boss pay one-third of what would constitute a minimum living wage.
• Burberry’s decision to close factories in Britain in 2007 and relocate manufacturing to China was driven by cost based analysis– it wanted to make £1.5m a year more in profit. Profit depends on companies maximising the difference between a garment’s sale price and its production cost.