Living ethically isn’t cheap, Vivienne
|
Version 0 of 1. Vivienne Westwood, whose designs I love but which far exceed most people’s price range, including mine, announced this week that she feels clothes cost too little. “Clothes should cost more – they are so subsidised,” she said. “Food should cost more too – you know something is wrong when you can buy a cooked chicken for £2.” In the midst of a cost-of-living crisis that has led to even people in employment resorting to food banks, no doubt many will find her comments unhelpful. A Cambridge University study released this month found that eating healthily costs three times as much as consuming unhealthy food, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the same were also true of eating ethically. Two free-range chicken breasts in my local supermarket cost between five and six pounds. I was brought up in a household that was committed to animal welfare so we rarely ate chicken at all, and I still don’t. I grew up on lentils and cheaper cuts of meat, while jealously eyeing my friends’ turkey dinosaurs and spaghetti hoops. My family made sacrifices in order to live more ethically, but not everyone is prepared, or able, to do this. This is not the first time that Westwood has made comments such as these. Last year she said poor people should buy fewer clothes, a statement to which I wanted to respond: “They do.” Granted, my early years came before Primark’s fast fashions began filling the wardrobes of the nation – the store is currently expanding its flagship behemoth to take up yet more of Oxford Street – but even if it had existed then, we couldn’t have afforded much anyway. When you don’t have any money, you can’t really buy anything. It’s that simple. When you have a very small amount of money, chances are you’re going to use it to buy things that don’t cost very much. “Poor people can’t afford to buy cheap things,” my Grandma always used to say, and I think this is what Westwood is getting at. We all need to consume less, and invest in things that last, but it’s easier said than done when your child’s only pair of shoes has holes in and he starts school next week, your income support hasn’t come through, and you can’t think about anything other than the fact the rent is due. One of the main issues I had with the ethical fashion industry, in which I briefly worked, is that only rich people could afford to buy the clothes we were selling. When people are struggling financially, there is no use getting on your high horse about ethical consumption, as I did after the Bangladeshi textiles factory collapse in 2013. Traumatised and angered by an image of a dead, dust-covered couple lying in each other’s arms, I was furious when a friend of mine continued to shop at Primark. Eventually she broke down in tears. “I can’t afford to look nice otherwise,” she told me. And let’s not forget that the messages about the importance of looking nice are all around us – especially for women. Opting out is easier said than done. I try: I buy fewer clothes, I go to charity shops. When I was younger, I read fashion magazines and stitched copies of the designer garments together for myself. Westwood has forgotten what it is like to be poor: that, unless you are willing to eat only lentils and wear a literal hair shirt, living ethically and healthily are luxuries only the well-off can afford. But those relying on welfare are still exposed to the same diktats: the culturally embedded notion that a meal isn’t a meal unless it has meat in it, that appearances are everything, and that, even if you’re not rich, you can always make people believe you are, with a few fast fashion copies of more expensive clothes and your hair dyed over a sink. You might just pass the test, until all those chicken nuggets catch up with you and you become obese. You can never be too rich or too thin – that’s how the saying goes, isn’t it? I don’t know what the solution is, but I do know that setting prices that render the poor even more excluded probably won’t help. I admire the healthy eating messages of Jack Monroe and Jamie Oliver, and would like to see the food industry take more responsibility. With clothes, it’s harder, because they signify so much about wealth and our ability to consume, and people really don’t seem to care about how much the person who stitched their skirt together was paid. Or they don’t have the energy to care. Caring is a luxury. |