Ethical Fashion Initiative
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Ethical fashion? No, it’s not an oxymoron PUBLISHED: 22 Aug 2013 Matthew Drummond Free Bradley Manning! The slogan and a rough screen-print of the smiling face of the US marine, found guilty of leaking sensitive state secrets to WikiLeaks, adorned the T-shirts of models in Vivienne Westwood’s 2014 Spring/Summer menswear show in Milan. It was a touch of anarchic politics, apt for the 73-year-old British fashion designer and queen of punk and it duly captured the headlines in the next day’s press. But entirely unnoticed was another message, more subtle yet more enduring, hidden on the bags the models carried as they sauntered down the runway. The bags’ metal clasps and Vivienne Westwood logos were cast by a middle-aged Kenyan named Steve Brass who lives in the world’s biggest urban slum. There is little glamour in Kibera, a sea of rusted corrugated tin on the edge of Nairobi filled with rubbish and open sewers and home to anywhere between 200,000 and 800,000 people – no-one has ever been able to count. Steve Brass once traded in scrap metal but then he met an energetic Italian named Simone Cipriani, who set him to work melting down car parts and turning the resulting alloy into small golden orbs that once signified royalty, but now signify the Westwood brand. He earns enough to employ about a dozen fellow residents of Kibera and collectively this group has turned their precarious existence into a solid link in the global fashion supply chain. The poor are reliable people, says Cipriani, his English accented with Italian and a good measure of infectious enthusiasm. Indeed in a place like Kibera the only way to survive is through incredible self-employment and entrepreneurial skills. What might seem a scandal – African slum-dwellers making items destined for fashion accessories that will sell for hundreds of pounds – is part of the Ethical Fashion Initiative, a program under the auspices of the United Nations and the World Trade Organisation which has created an unlikely embrace between development workers and the fashion pack. Cipriani is its head and founder and while there is nothing new in fair-trade clothing, no one else has managed to take feel-good fashion to the heights of the world’s most coveted brands. Cipriani’s collaborators include Westwood and Stella McCartney in the UK, sass & bide in Australia and United Arrows in Japan, along with 7000 people who have been given work and a means to escape poverty in Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, Burkina Faso and Mali in Africa and Haiti in the Caribbean. Together they are making fashion from the slums. Indulgence and nihilism Ethical fashion? The term sounds like an oxymoron for an industry that sometimes seems to wallow in indulgence and hedonistic nihilism. The value more often found across the fashion sector seems to be that of shock. If fashion icons aren’t causing offence – Comme des Garçons releasing a collection of Auschwitz-inspired prison outfits, John Galliano proclaiming his love for Hitler while drunk in a Paris bar – then they’re causing trouble. Kate Moss snorting what for all intents and purposes looked like cocaine, Naomi Campbell pegging her phone at her housekeeper or receiving a chunky diamond from a war-mongering African dictator. Fashion labels on the hunt for a little publicity have been known to serve up advertise-ments that glamorise anorexia or sexualise teenagers or hint at violence towards women. And if that all fails there’s always fur. “To do this job you must be able to accept injustice,” Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld once said in what could be the fashion world’s Nicene Creed. “If you want social justice, be a public servant. Fashion is ephemeral, dangerous and unfair.” Cipriani does not attempt to sermonise against this conscience-lite vision of the industry. His pitch to designers is in large part anchored by compelling business logic. Fashion houses should manufacture in Africa because Africa has what they want: artisans who can make beautiful things by hand. “Where we work in Africa is not for mass production,” Cipriani says, drawing a contrast with the factories and ready-for-export infrastructure of Asia. “The competitive advantage of Africa is an incredible capacity of manual work, of artisans who have incredible skills which are very beautiful and very suitable also for producing luxurious products.” But there also is a touch of noblesse oblige. The profit margins for upmarket labels are wide enough that they can be harnessed to lift the poorest people in developing countries up and out of poverty, Cipriani says. The ethical use of labour – paying proper wages and measuring their impact to ensure sustainable development – is truly creative in a world of mass market, just-in-time, rapid-response clothing brands. It allows high-end fashion companies to stand well apart from the likes of those whose clothes were made in the Rana Plaza building in Bangladesh. For Cipriani the legacy of that building’s collapse in April, which killed 1127 garment workers, should be an end to fashion that is as disposable as the lives of the people who made it. “We have to realise that the era of cheap fashion has to come to an end,” he says. “We cannot have this kind of thing where you buy five jumpers for $70 and then you throw one away because they are so cheap.” True creativity takes time and care and it can provide transformational opportunities to people otherwise locked out of the global economy. This, Cipriani says, is what fashion allows. Tents and grain sacks David Briskin, the chief of hip Australian womens’ wear label sass & bide, is one of Cipriani’s disciples. Briskin and his then wife Amanda made $45 million selling their fashion business, Mimco, to private equity in 2007. His new company makes bags and key rings in Kibera and more products are planned. Making things in Africa doesn’t happen as smoothly as manufacturing in Asia, he says. The time zone difference is longer, travel is more difficult and the range of materials on offer is much smaller. But drawing on materials in Africa, where everything gets used to the end of its life, gives sass & bide products a unique feel in the Australian marketplace. The tote bags are made from tent canvasses and grain sacks, while the key rings use hand beaten, recycled car parts. “Sometimes things that are a bit more difficult can be alluring as well,” Briskin says. He has been so inspired by the Ethical Fashion Initiative that he is now trying to lure designers and managers from other Australian fashion brands to join him on his first trip to Kibera later this year. He doubts that anyone other than Cipriani, a one-off who combines his upbringing among the artisans of Tuscany with studies in international development, could have brought together such different worlds with such success. Cipriani believes in the power of the fashion industry to transform African countries because he has seen it transform his own. Born in a town near Florence in 1964, the Italy of his youth was in the final stages of a 20-year economic miracle. Fascist autarky and then World War II had devas-tated the country. US dollars from the Marshall Plan turned the lights back on in textile plants and Made in Italy became a coveted brand. Instead of doing compulsory military service, the young Cipriani enlisted in a year of social work with disadvantaged children. There he met his wife Stefania Gori, who comes from a family of entrepreneurs who have amassed a collection of site-specific, publicly shown artworks including sculptures by Daniel Buren and Sol LeWitt. Cipriani studied international development at university and set to work for a shoe manufacturer in his native Tuscany. As manufacturing shifted to Asia in the 1990s the trend that others saw as unfortunate offshoring was seen by Cipriani as a way to use trade to make the unfortunate better off. He worked in India, Indonesia, Vietnam and Bangladesh, helping clothing and shoe manufacturers with training, quality control and research and development skills. He had been working as a consultant on such programs to the UN when he was invited to Africa to see how garment and leather export industries could be built up there. Together with his wife and three young children the family moved to Ethiopia. There he had a setback that proved instructive. The novelty of his initial African project – a leather handbag brand called Taytu that was touted as Ethiopia’s first luxury label – achieved a flash of publicity but just as quickly the business disappeared. Cipriani says it was too reliant on development ideas of so-called “capacity building” and not enough time was spent ensuring the products would find a market. He is scathing of the bureaucracy-ridden model of development aid that he says bequeaths nothing other than enormous unused production plants left to rust because they never made anything that people truly wanted to buy. “All these people who work in development – they want to build something and I have seen the waste of money, in Africa, in Asia, everywhere, by international organisations, by bilateral corporations, by charities, by foundations,” he says with more than a hint of anger. “The model where you invest only in capacity building is wrong. It’s the market that matters and it’s solely the market. These big structures will never work. The only thing which works is to create capacity to access the market.” Ethical market With his Tuscan upbringing and his background in fashion, he found what he was looking for – artisans – thanks to the help of some missionaries working in the slums of Nairobi, the capital of Kenya.