Earlier this month the Ethical Fashion Forum held a seminar and marketplace in London on why Africa is becoming increasingly important in the apparel industry. According to EFF, in Kenya alone 30,000 people are employed in the apparel sector and for each of these jobs, another five are generated. As fashion is labour generated and requires limited capital input to fund, traditional skills such as hand-weaving, hand-embroidering, printing and tailoring offer a high premium.



Trade in… Continue

Ethical clothing. Fair trade. Organic cotton. Sweatshop labour. All words we've heard strung together and often put in sentences to make us feel guilty about our consumption. The guilt is often swept aside once another cheap and disposable clothing purchase is made, and not thought of again in most cases.



Why is this? I spoke to a Fairtrade certified retailer in my hometown of Carlisle a couple of weeks ago, and she showed me some interesting statistics. The month of the Make Poverty… Continue

If you have lived an awfully privileged life, you will never know the value of anything because you have never needed to. That goes without saying. But if you have lived a moderately privileged lifestyle, nowadays, you can still never understand the value of anything.



By anything, I mean materialistically. A friend said to me upon returning from a trip from Kenya, "I could live there. You get so used to not having material possessions, it's like you never had them in the first… Continue