The Myth Of The Ethical Shopper

If you’ve ever been to a corporate social responsibility conference, you’ve undoubtedly heard the story of the three fire extinguishers. The way it goes is, an inspector was walking through a clothing factory in Bangladesh and noticed that it had three fire extinguishers on the wall, one right on top of the other. He asked why, and the manager of the factory told him, “We get audited under three different standards, and they each require us to have a fire extinguisher a different distance from the floor. We got tired of moving the fire extinguisher every time an inspector came, so now we just have one at each height.”

This is the world that No Logo built. By the end of the ’90s, a society-wide consensus had formed on how companies should operate their developing-country factories. First, we wanted them to ban all the terrible things we read about in magazines. No more child labor, choked ventilation, abusive bosses, confiscated passports. Companies should apply U.S. working conditions or, at the minimum, follow local laws where they operated. Second, we wanted them to send inspectors to see if those commitments were being met.

And most companies did these things. That was the easy part. The hard part, it turned out, is that these structures aren’t designed to make factories take better care of their workers. They’re designed to make factories look like they are.

I read Michael Hobbes’ essay on the persistent myth that we — Western consumers of clothing — can buy ourselves better the same way he describes the participants in a social experiment designed to show them the error of their materialist ways: with a hand over my mouth, stunned by something I already knew.

For Highline, Hobbes describes a fact that most of us have accepted with varying levels of outrage. The majority of clothing sold to Western consumers is made, at best, under terrible conditions. More accurately the majority of clothing sold to Western consumers is destructive to the people who make it, the people who buy it, and the planet we live on.

I have often railed against people who complain about the rising price of clothing; I once had the immense satisfaction of explaining to someone’s dad at a dinner party why, precisely, a Hermés bag was so expensive. He had started with a classic dad schtick (“What’s the deal with ladies and their overpriced purses?”) and I, two glasses of wine in, couldn’t let this inaccuracy stand.

The Hermés bag comes with its on set of environmental and labor issues, to be sure, and I don’t mean to discount them; but his Gap khakis represented a kind of sartorial and ethical hypocrisy that could not go unchecked, in my morally superior mind. The steeply declining price of clothes is where the issue lies because the decline represents what is, I think, a key shift in the thought process behind buying clothes. Lowering the price lowers the literal value of, say, a pair of jeans, while it lowers the psychic value of what buying a pair of jeans means. The lower the cost, the less value we place on the object. The pressure to think of our clothes as something that literally does not matter, as something that can be purchased with the same ease as a cup of coffee or some other disposable object, as something that can be tossed in the trash as soon as it becomes unfashionable or, more likely, as soon as it falls apart, is part of a mentality that views every aspect of the clothing industry as disposable, unimportant, and unworthy of the kind of close scrutiny that could affect real change. That’s the mentality that keeps us buying organic cotton or whatever while the people at the very top of the industry keep their businesses running the same way they always have. It’s an individual solution to a problem that requires an institutional solution.

There have been a lot of really wonderful articles and books about the problems within the industry, and the frustrating lack of solutions, but Hobbes offers an actual idea that’s proven effective in a comparable industry. Read it! Think about it! And then come back here and tell me about those thoughts.