Clothing Industry: Ethical and Sustainable Fashion

Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall Excerpts

Thursday 3rd March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall]

My Lords, I join all those who have spoken in congratulating my noble friend—because she is my friend—Lady Young of Hornsey on securing this debate at, as she said, an extraordinarily timely moment; and on her tremendous vigour in seizing this issue and in getting the all-party group going, which is a good and helpful way to bring these issues to the attention of a lot more people. As part of declaring my interests, I am delighted to say that I have joined that group, and I hope that many other noble Lords and Members of the other place will do so in due course.

I should declare another interest in that my son is a member of the small but extremely effective team that makes up the Centre for Sustainable Fashion at the London College of Fashion, which has been mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Young. I am indebted to him and his colleague Dr Kate Fletcher for useful briefing for this debate. As a result of taking on that briefing, I may, rather like my noble friend Lord Sugar, go slightly off-piste in terms of the way that this debate might have been expected to develop. I hope that your Lordships will forgive me.

The fashion industry divides opinion. For those involved in it, it is all consuming and endlessly fascinating. For others, it represents some of the most repellent aspects of a vain, consumerist culture. Personally, I confess to being more fascinated than repelled. I love clothes and I love fashion. What has not yet been said in this debate is that we have to recognise that fashion is part of the entertainment industry, at least to some extent. There is a lot of fun in fashion, and that is what attracts people to it. I particularly love the imagination and creativity of designers, and I admire the artistry of the photographers and stylists through whose eyes we understand their work. Frankly, most of us never get on to the front row, or even the back row, of a catwalk show in fashion week. It is therefore a tremendous pleasure to have the opportunity to talk about these matters in this House.

The noble Baroness, Lady Young, has framed her topic carefully. It refers to the,

“ethical and sustainable fashion and clothing industry”.

Another thing that has not quite been teased out—and I am not going to try to—is the definition of the difference between fashion and clothes; but there is something there that is quite interesting. I want to concentrate on “sustainable” and “clothing”, but in a slightly different way—in perhaps a micro, rather than a macro, way. I want to talk about the old fashioned concept of “make do and mend”—perhaps appropriately in these straitened times.

We have already heard that most of the clothes available today on the high street are made far away in China, Asia or eastern Europe by people who we will probably never meet, working in conditions we would prefer not to think about, for wages that would barely buy us a cup of coffee. These clothes are, as a consequence, absurdly cheap—as we have heard—which allows them to be regarded as disposable. The human, economic and environmental consequences of our overconsumption have been graphically spelt out by other speakers. However, this is a fairly recent phenomenon. Other speakers have touched on how different it was when they were growing up. Certainly, when I was growing up, clothes were relatively much more expensive and there was much less choice.

If you go back a bit further into the 19th century and beyond, the picture is even more starkly different. Clothes had to be made by hand, either by the person who was going to wear them or, for the better off, by a professional tailor or seamstress in the community. Making clothes was hard work. They had to last and they were often therefore reinvented by the addition of small embellishments, such as lace or ribbons, remade to suit changed shape or fashion, or passed on to others. How do I know this? It is not from serious study, but from reading novels—not, I regret, the novels of my noble friend Lady Rendell, but mostly the novels of the 19th century. If you take any of the great writers of that period—Dickens, Trollope, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, and who remembers The Moonstone and the vital importance of a handmade nightgown to the plot of that novel?—you will find it all there in the detail of those novels. Most women and some men, until two or three generations ago, whatever social class they belonged to, would have had some skill in sewing, knitting, perhaps even lace-making or embroidery, and most importantly in repairing clothes. Such simple domestic accomplishments became unfashionable, I think largely from the point at which women began to seek a wider role in public life. Of course I do not regret that, but it had this consequence, among many others.

Now these skills have become the preserve of specialists. In the theatre, for example, where I have spent most of my professional life, clothes—costumes—are hugely important, both to the people who wear them and to the audiences who look at them. Many, especially in large classical theatre or opera companies, are tailor-made for individual performers, and require not only exceptional skill in cutting and making— comparable to that in fashion houses—but often the application of detailed research into style, fabric and decoration. They must also be made to withstand the rigours of whatever a performance may demand. Consequently, each piece costs a lot to produce and has to be maintained carefully throughout its life, which can be long. Many costumes, once their initial use is fulfilled, go into store, and in time reappear having been refurbished and changed in a completely different production.

This is sustainability in action. We have to ask, in a world of austerity and diminishing resources, whether we should not be learning again to value the ability to make things last, not just as a rare specialism, but as a normal part of everyone’s personal toolkit. Dr Fletcher of the London College of Fashion, to whom I referred earlier, points out that today the extreme cheapness of new clothes has pretty much consigned repair to history, overtaken by a new philosophy of “discard and repurchase”, about which we have heard a great deal this evening. The commercial imperative behind this, from the point of view of the industry, is pretty obvious. She also observes that the fact that most of us lack the practical skills nowadays to repair things ourselves must be partly to do with a general undervaluing of manual skills-based education, compared with academic subjects. It is timely to remember this on the day that the Wolf report is produced. We are not talking about it today, but I note it.

Furthermore, if we want to have our clothes repaired or altered professionally, it is increasingly difficult to find people able to do it. Even when we do, I fear that we are reluctant to pay properly for their services, thus making it hard for small businesses, to which my noble friend Lord Sugar referred—there are lots of them in this industry—to survive. When the Minister replies, I wonder whether he would consider the following questions; they are small but not entirely insignificant, I hope. First, how can the Government help to underline, through our education system and beyond, the importance of having basic skills necessary to get the maximum use from everything we consume? Secondly, what help can the Government give, perhaps through reductions in VAT or other tax breaks, to small businesses such as clothing repair services, aiming at this kind of sustainability?

The fashion industry is highly influential, particularly on young people. If it began to move away from its focus on cheapness and disposability, and started to construct some messages about the importance of conserving, reusing and repairing—it would be very difficult for it, I entirely understand—then the generation that needs to hear might begin to listen. There are some signs that this is about to happen. I hope that they will grow.