AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Sketch fashion big women1/25/2024 “We need to fund those in the same way that we fund Silicon Valley,” Custom Collective’s Okaro says. From working to grant land rights to women in the agricultural supply chain to ensuring pay equity in corporate executive suites, people are pushing interventions in every facet of the industry. There’s no shortage of options for how to do that. Fashion must recognise both the long-term repercussions of historic pay inequities, or lack of paid work entirely, and the absence of major funding to develop, implement and scale initiatives dedicated to addressing gender inequality and its root causes - and then step up and get to work, including where it allocates spending. Fundingįinally, there’s no substitute for investment. In search of solutions to both the problems facing women in Accra, and the larger global issue of clothing overproduction, the OR Foundation is working to establish local textile recycling infrastructure, facilitate skills training for women locally and to engage with fashion companies and other international players to try to stem the flow of garments coming in. For us, our work is about trying to give them more autonomy and agency in their life, and to help them be aware of not only the harm that their labour is doing to their bodies, but also the incredible value that they have in their society,” says Ricketts. “We just collapse them into this object that we can move around and make decisions for. They are experiencing debilitating pain and they are labouring in debt slavery, but they are still full human beings.” They still laugh, they still have best friends, they still dance on the weekends. “There is a tendency to collapse everything that a woman is into the role that she plays in society. While the trade has disproportionately impacted women, the foundation has not focused much of its public advocacy work on gender issues - although elevating women and girls is a major focus internally - out of fear of diminishing their personhood, she says. “It's very common in the sustainability movement to hear this idea that there is no ‘away,’ but for us that’s not very accurate. The apprenticeship is a nine-month programme that provides skills training as well as basic resources, such as a metrocard and a tablet, to facilitate women’s ability to participate, as well as income when small brands are hosting the apprentices, Custom Collaborative pays their salaries (using the funding from Chanel), and when large brands host the apprentices, they are responsible for paying their wages. With financial support from the Chanel Foundation, Custom Collaborative is in the process of expanding an apprenticeship programme it piloted with Mara Hoffman in 2020 in partnership with the Slow Factory and Swarovski foundations. A former compliance officer and then special assistant to the chief of Cal/OSHA (California’s state agency for occupational safety and health), he now coordinates a global network of occupational safety and health professionals volunteering to address workplace hazards in the Global South. “Decades of well-financed ‘corporate social responsibility’ programmes have failed because they do not address the underlying causes of illegal and abusive working conditions,” Brown wrote in a paper last year. Kering, for example, lists goals such as gender parity and equal pay in its three-pillar sustainability plan for 2025, and gender equality was a key focus for footwear label Nisolo when it developed the “sustainability facts” label, released in December to encourage fashion brands to take a more cohesive approach to sustainability.Īnd, when Chloé announced the creation of a Social Performance & Leverage tool last week, corporate social responsibility director Aude Vergne said gender equality - and the inability to measure it using existing tools such as social auditing - was a key motivating factor. The most progressive brands are shifting those dynamics and have started to work towards gender equality as part of their overall sustainability strategies. It’s common for fashion companies to have statements on their websites about women’s rights or equal pay, but less common to see details about what they’re doing to achieve those ideals in their operations. So what does good look like? Including gender equality in fashion’s sustainability strategy
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |