What is Total Ethics Fashion? Prioritize People Before Profit

If you've done some digging in the world of ethical clothing production and fashion, you might have come across the phrase "total ethics fashion." What is it, what does it mean for you, and how can you engage with the movement? Let's talk about it.

What is Total Ethics Fashion?

Total Ethics Fashion can refer to three different things.

From the narrowest to the broadest, they are:

• The book Total Ethics Fashion, by Emma Hakansson, which serves as a lengthy manifesto for the movement and a core pillar of the ethics, stances, goals, and way of thinking represented by the movement.
• The manifesto, petition, and organization called Total Ethics Fashion, spearheaded by the Collective Fashion Justice group lead by Emma Hakansson, Joshua Katcher, Unique Vance, and Sel Burek.
• The overall movement towards ethical fashion that encompasses all of the many facets of economic, social, ecological, and other forms of justice.

All three are interconnected and are parts of the same whole, so we'll really just be discussing the holistic totality of the three.

Ethical Fashion from All Angles

One of the greatest challenges we face in the fashion industry is the sheer level of damage that fashion can do to the planet, the people on it, and the plants and animals that live here with us.

For example, we (the collective we, not those of us at Ethix) tend to get a little tunnel visioned towards specific aspects of environmentalism. We talk a lot about carbon emissions, and the way they impact the overall climate, the way we push as companies, as nations, and as individuals to reduce our carbon footprint.

When you broaden your view, however, you can see that there's a lot more to environmentalism and ecological justice than just carbon emissions.

• There are air pollutants other than carbon that can be emitted by the fashion industry during the production process.
• There are problems with overconsumption of resources, depriving geographic areas of farmland, water, or other needs.
• There are scarce resources that the fashion industry hoovers up when they could be better used elsewhere.
• There are water pollutants that saturate water with minerals and nutrients, causing algae blooms that can choke out other life and hurt biodiversity.
• There's the exploitation of animals for fashion in the production of goods like leather, sinew, bone, and others.
• There's a loss of biodiversity when areas of diverse forest or other kinds of land are clearcut and used for monoculture crops.

All of this is just touching on the surface of the problems we face as a species and a planet.

To be clear, not everyone who talks about "carbon emissions" is so narrowly-focused. Some people use it as a shorthand for all of the above and more. Others are more focused, and unfortunately, many fashion brands keep their definitions narrow so they can technically meet goals while tactically ignoring other forms of damage or injustice.

And all of the above hasn't even mentioned the human cost. The exploitation of impoverished and less developed communities and nations, the poverty it enforces, the fact that so many of the people employed to make products can't afford to buy the products they make, the inequality perpetuated within and between these communities, and much more.

In a very simplified summary, Total Ethics Fashion is about raising awareness of these issues, broadening minds, broadening the scope of policy and efforts to counteract it all, and pushing the global community as a whole towards a more ethical and equitable reality.

If you're interested in learning more, Emma's book is very good, but there's also a freely-available primer PDF on their website, which you can find here. It's a lot shorter and summarizes a lot of the trickier issues, but it's a great introduction to their cause and perspective.

In broad strokes, Total Ethics Fashion is the overlap between three categories:

• Vegan fashion, which is fashion that doesn't require animal skins, animal-derived glues and dyes, or animal products – even the more sustainable ones like wool, silk, and down.
• Sustainable fashion, which is fashion that incorporates low-impact processes, doesn't speed through the process with mechanization and exploitation, and uses eco-friendly materials.
• Fair fashion, which is fashion supported by paying people living wages, supporting social justice, and helping empower workers.

A lot of what we focus on here at Ethix follows many of these stances. We support unionized workers, we support local producers, we don't support the exploitation of global communities, and we emphasize eco-friendly production. We do handle some animal products, but we source them from ethical sources, like leather from existing byproducts, rather than from animals raised specifically for their skin.

Who is Involved in Total Ethics Fashion?

The leadership of the Collective Fashion Justice movement is those four people listed above.

Once again, they are:

• Emma Hakansson, an activist and creator who publishes books, delivers speeches, produces short films, and works with organizations up to and including the United Nations to help promote the awareness of fashion justice around the world. She's the founding director of the organization.
• Joshua Katcher, the founder of Brave Gentlemen, which is the first fully animal-free menswear label. He's also a lecturer, an author, and a director of sustainable innovation for TAHG.
• Unique Vance, the co-founder of Vegan Voices of Color, an activist in ethics and environmental justice, and a member of a legal support organization in Australia for marginalized individuals.
• Sel Burek, a program coordinator for Four Paws Australia, a researcher, fact-checker, and editor, and a member of the legal team at the Animal Defenders Office.

These aren't the only people involved, of course. Despite being based out of Australia, they have a global reach, and they're always soliciting signatures and commitments on their manifesto. If you're interested, you can read the manifesto here and sign it if you agree. They have over 500 endorsements from individuals, organizations, institutions, brands, businesses, and even some governments.

Replacing Materials

If you read through the primer and manifesto, you might come away thinking that Total Ethics Fashion is too extreme to work. It's one thing to be opposed to exploitative factory farming and environmentally-polluting processes, but the prevailing narrative is that things like wool and down aren't harmful. After all, birds shed their feathers naturally, and sheep that aren't sheared end up suffering for it.

The truth is that even these processes cause damage. It's not about not shearing the sheep; it's about not selectively breeding the sheep to overproduce wool to dangerous levels. It's not all just about the treatment of the animals, either; often, the workers shearing the sheep are in terrible conditions, given no support, and are exploited.

Overall, Total Ethics Fashion promotes getting rid of and moving past these materials:

• Animal-derived materials, especially those that require the exploitation and slaughter of animals.
• Virgin synthetics made from fossil fuels, since making more plastics isn't a good thing.
• Cellulose materials that aren't certified, because they often are products of deforestation.
• Cotton that isn't ethically produced.

Obviously, the Collective Fashion Justice group understands that pushing to cease all use of these products immediately isn't realistic; hence, the phrasing " move beyond" these materials. Dial back demand and use, reduce production, start to reverse the genetic manipulations on farmed animals to return them to healthier stock, and eventually, in the future, we'll be in a better position.

At the same time, they identify materials to use instead of the ones on the list to avoid. These include:

• Leather alternatives like recycled polyurethane leather, cork, mirum, mycelium, pineapple leaf, mango, cactus, and even paper leather substitutes.
• Wool alternatives like sustainable cotton, Tencel, hemp, and bamboo fabrics.
• Fur alternatives like recycled denim, recycled faux fur, bio-based fur, or the neomaterial GACHA.
• Silk alternatives like cupro, recycled satin, bamboo, and orange fiber.
• Down alternatives like recycled synthetics and flowerdown.

Many of these materials are novel and interesting, and while production is currently low, it can be scaled up as more investment and attention is paid to them.

Social Pressure and Cultural Wins

As an activist movement, Collective Fashion Justice and the Total Ethics Fashion movement have been making strides in increasing their influence, building awareness, and effecting change.

Some of the things they've managed to do include:

• Helping push New York City to adopt sustainable textile purchasing as law.
• Getting their educational short film listed as a government resource in Australian schools.
• Pressuring fraudulent fur sellers and getting them fined.
• Getting various Fashion Week events to ban fur entirely.
• Pressuring Nike and Puma into banning kangaroo leather.
• Helping pressure the store MYER into cutting ties with horse racing.
• Promoting the funding and development of Hemp products in Victoria.

The movement had some fast initial growth and has slowed, but is still growing and helping to put pressure on industries and businesses, promoting alternative resources, and fighting overall injustice. It's a drop in the bucket for the global atmosphere, but it's just one more straw laid on the camel's back of industry.

Can You Join and Support Total Ethics Fashion?

Of course!

There are several ways you can join, help, or support the Total Ethics Fashion movement.

The first and most direct is to support the Collective Fashion Justice organization itself. On their support page, they have options and ways you can donate money, you can donate your time to help out in ways unique to you and your skills, experience, and position, you can join their collective action movements, protests, pressure campaigns, letter-writing, and newsletter, and you can share their work with your following.

You can also sign onto their manifesto, as linked above.

You can also buy the book, read it, and internalize the information it contains. If you're not ready for the whole book, the primer is an excellent place to start.

As a business, you can take steps to change materials and suppliers as you can, whether that's something as simple as changing your packaging, getting employee uniforms from a different, more ethical source, or redesigning your entire product lines. Obviously, Total Ethics Fashion is centered around fashion, but even business owners who aren't part of the fashion industry can adopt some of the ethical ideals and stances that make it tick and sign on to support the movement.

If you're a fashion designer or brand label, of course, you're in a much more influential position to help with the movement, and it's something you should seriously investigate and consider.

As a citizen and consumer, there's a lot less you can do in terms of overall influence, but the old adage of "voting with your wallet" applies. Look into the businesses and brands that support Total Ethics Fashion and buy your apparel through them, join letter-writing and other social campaigns to pressure the companies that aren't making changes, and do what you can to emphasize sustainability and longevity over fast fashion and consumption.

Here at Ethix, we aren't entirely part of the Total Ethics Fashion movement, but we share many of the same ideals. We focus on ethical and sustainable products, on social and environmental justice, and on an overall movement towards a better future. You can read all about our stances both here on our blog and on our About page. You can also reach out and contact us directly, either about our stances as a whole or about individual products we offer in our store.

Sometimes, the problems we face on this planet feel insurmountable. How can any one individual or one business stand against even a single massive corporation, let alone the entire industry of exploitation? The truth is, every little bit helps. One drop of rain won't move a mountain, but erosion will flatten them all eventually. Together, with collective effort, attention, influence, and progress, we can all change the world.

We hope you'll join us on this journey, whether it's as little as choosing to buy our ethically sourced merchandise or something stronger.

Do you have any questions about anything we discussed in this article? If so, please feel free to let us know! We'd be more than happy to help however we can!