Financial Times recognizes ITC's role in starting ethical fashion movement

ITC's Ethical Fashion initiative played a pioneering role in using high-end fashion to help the developing world, according to a recent article in FT Magazine. The article acknowledged ITC's role in creating the ethical fashion movement, whose mission is to involve marginalized communities in the production of handbags, jewellery and other fashion items designed by Western fashion brands.

Several sources interviewed for the article explained the importance of fashion and textile exports for poor communities. “Fashion and the textile industry play a big role in social development,” the article quotes Paco De Jaimes of World Fashion Week. “If you look at communities that have received micro-financing, the first thing a large percentage of them do is buy a sewing machine and a piece of fabric.”

"We are happy that there is a strong movement towards a different way to do fashion with both consumers and the industry recognizing that fashion must be fair," the FT quoted Simone Cipriani, who heads ITC's Ethical Fashion initiative.

Vanessa Friedman, fashion editor of the FT, writes “in the process of coming to fashion as a tool for social change, the change agents themselves have taken on board the importance of fashion itself: that in order to make their businesses sustainable (…) they need a convincing creative proposition attractive enough to sell on its own without the feel-good dressing.” The system established by ITC is specifically relevant to this concept: it allows micro-entrepreneurs from Africa to produce fashion and lifestyle goods for the international market: Goods with a story, which stand on their own alongside other mainstream fashion collections. The Programme

enables communities of artisans and micro-manufacturers, the majority of them women, to thrive in association with the talents of the fashion world. This develops local creativity, fosters predominantly female employment and promotes gender equality in order to reduce poverty. It also answers the growing demand of consumers that fashion should be fair.

For more information, see the Ethical Fashion pages of this web site.