Foreword to “The Trusted Clothes Collection: Volume VI”
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/01/23
This is another in the last collection of interviews for Trusted Clothes based out of Ontario, though done in Langley, British Columbia, Canada. These are interesting endeavours. All of them small to medium businesspeople. Certainly, there is a formulation of these businesses as a landscape akin to a gaussian distribution.
In my experience in that industry, most of the small and medium businesses are women. From young adult to early middle-aged, they work hard. There are some men, but not that many. A small cohort of super-high achievers like Tom Ford at the highest end, but not in the ethical and sustainable fashion industry as far as I know. He should enter it. Tom Ford, as seems apparent, turned Gucci around from a faltering if not failing business into a successful one.
He’s a business ad fashion genius. So much so, Jay-Z has a song after him: “Tom Ford.” Ethical and sustainable fashion could use this type of person in it. There’s definitely woo in that area of fashion, as with many areas of global society. However, the idea, or the principles, of ethical fashion to reduce damage to the environment and harm to people, and sustainable for ecology, make sense.
Regardless, there’s more not-woo than woo, so that’s a net win. Also, giving people skills in awful circumstances is better than entering something like sex trafficking in Thailand or something. It’s a trade-off. As I noted in the previous collection, the central issue is the scaling up of this type of business. How do you do it? Essentially, if we could get mega fashion brands such as Hermès, Louis Vuitton, Dior, and Chanel, to shift, then the whole market does.
This isn’t unfeasible. These industries — whole brands — were invented overnight, in essence, and, thus, this can be done again. The central question for analysis is the tilt of one of the pillars in fashion, whatever one and wherever, to make this style of industry-wide change. If it is shown as sufficiently profitable and cost-saving over time, then the profit motive should shift the corporations, accordingly, as pressure from shareholders may, as Picard says, “Make it so.”
These small and medium businesses in enough numbers can make small to medium impact. However, their collective pressure and example may help with this shift as well. I do not view big brands as evil or polyester fabrics as the work of the Devil, but as means by which to make a more ethical and sustainable path forward in one area of human consumption.
We live in the world. We live with the world. We are part of the natural world. Our ethical considerations should extend this personal concern to the natural world because nature is in us and so us. I do not mean anything spiritual or mystical, but something concrete and material. Our health and sustainability as a species is connected to our ingenuity and consumption patterns.
We’d be wise to take the innate nature of Nature in us as a fact for implementing production and consumption patterns.
January 23, 2024
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
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