Kilda.
I'm Chelsea Daniels and This is the Front Page, a daily podcast.
Presented by The New Zealand Herald.
The rise and rise of online retailers has hit an all time high, with the likes of Timu and she In dominating consumption worldwide. New research is revealed over the course of three months, one in four kiwis surveyed purchased products from ultra fast fashion retailer Timu. A further fourteen percent of kiwis are estimated to have recently purchased from Chen.
The stats keep coming.
Cheerfund's twenty twenty one Ethical Fashion Report found in twenty nineteen, forty percent of clothes imported into New Zealand could be made using forced and child labor. It's all while one study fol garments were thrown out after no more than ten wearings. So when it comes to T shirts and dresses being sold as low as six dollars, who's really paying the price?
Today?
On the front Page, Tear Fund head of Advocacy, Claire Gray joins us to discuss. Claire, first off, can you tell me what fast fashion is?
So fast fashion it's got its name for a reason, So it's the really fast productional replication of catwalk trends into our wardrobes, and so we've seen it a vole over the years. When it originally started to take shape, we would see, you know, a designer brand modeling a look on at the catwalk, and then instead of within kind of three weeks, we would see stores like Zara
or H and M having it in their shops. And now we've kind of moved and the model has evolved to what we now call ultra fast fashion, and that is basically everything about fast fashion on steroids. It's quicker production speeds, it's more variety and cheaper prices.
And with ultra fast fashion, you can see a new.
Style going from the catwalk into your wardrobe or well into final production in about ten days, which is absolutely mind blowing in terms of its time frames.
And I suppose people might say, look what I see in the store. That's a sixty dollars T shirt, but I can get it online for six dollars.
What's so wrong with that? But how can address.
Or T shirt even cost six dollars?
It's such a good question.
I think when something costs such a small amount of money, we can know for sure that shortcuts are being taken at some stage along the production. So when you think about what goes into a T shit, if it's a cotton T shirt, that cotton is farmed and then sold, and so that farmer needs to be paid a fair price for the cotton. And then the cotton is spun into yarn, it's woven into fabric, and it can be dyed.
And all of those processes require different sets of skills from the workers who are doing them, and they might take place in different factories, and those different factories might even be in different regions.
And then the fabric goes.
To a final stage manufacturing facility where it's actually solen into the.
T shirt that we see.
Depending on what that's like, it might be embellished or embroidered, then sold shipped to New Zealand.
And the price that we buy it for that's six dollars.
That includes a markup for the brand or the company that's selling it, so we're actually talking less than six dollars for the actual production cost. And when you're selling it for six dollars, you can just be sure that some workers along the way with it's the farmer or the person that wove that yarn, you're not being paid fairly for their work, or they're working in unsafe conditions
because it is. It's an impossibility no matter what your economies of scale are, it's impossible to take care of both people and the planet and your production and sell coming for that price.
Everything we wear was put together by human hands. There are no clothes sewing robots. You cannot put a bunch of fabric into a machine, press a button and a shirt comes out. The other end was made by people. It was made by humans setting out a sewing machine and putting it together. Labor is supposed to be the most expensive part of making something that when you get it and it's five dollars, the question should be, well, who got short changed?
Yeah, tear Funds research shows Kiwis are actually purchasing from these ultra fast fashion sites more regularly. What if you guys uncovered So.
We've been watching ultra fast fashion emerge. We were really curious to see how much of a foothold it has in New Zealand and so we commissioned research and we found that one in four New Zealanders that were surveyed had recently purchased from Timum and that equates to over a million of US shopping at Timu over, you know, in the last three months from the point that we did the research, and then there was another sort of
half a million shopping at Sheen. And so those numbers tell us that, you know, ultra fast fashion well and truly is a trend that kiwis are embracing.
And on many levels, it makes a lot of sense because.
Life is really expensive at the moment, and so when life is expensive, we're all struggling, you know, to balance our budgets to make ends meet, and so it's logical for many people to look for where they can save money.
And if they can save.
Money on clothes and team who has all the clothes they need for their family, you can see why people shop there.
And you know, we can see the rise in.
Ultra fast fashion that trend has coincided with the rise in our living costs.
So it makes a lot of sense on one level.
But how much waste is generated by us chucking out these clothes Because I don't know if you know anything about trends, but they cycle is why it's called a trend cycle. Hey, it's astonishing how much waste is produced by people throwing out textiles and clothes right.
Ah, it's totally mind blowing.
I actually read a stat that said ninety two million tons of textile waste is generated globally every year. Get this, It's equivalent to a rubbish truck full of clothes ending up in landfill every second. Like that's actually just like it really is absolutely mind blowing.
And I think what a lot of people.
Don't know is that with the variety of different fabrics, from synthetic fabrics through to more natural fibers, when these clothes are in landfall and they start breaking down, they actually mt greenhouse gases, and so it's like.
A double whammy in terms of the environmental impact.
It's a lot of waste, and that waste has damage as it is slowly breaking down.
Fashion retailers aren't stupid, though, Hey, I always see buzzwords and phrases like sustainably sourced, made from recycled materials and certified organic things like that. They've become a mainstay in their repertoire. It's starting to get pretty difficult for the average consumer to sort through everything presented to them, though, Hey, what would you say to them to make more conscious decisions.
I guess I absolutely agree with what you've just said. I recently read Shein's sustainability Report.
And I was sixty five pages long, and it had all.
The right buzzwords in it, and I just couldn't help but think at that point, I'll say, what is your average consumer meant to do?
Because even if they are taking.
That next step and actually investigating a brand before they buy from it, which is what we would recommend, it can be so hard to know if what you're reading is actually true or not, or you know, are they doing the right things or are they just pulling the wool over our eyes. I also read just this morning actually that fashion is one of the industries that has the most accusations of greenwashing leveled at it.
So I think consumers can do a couple of things.
So I mean, the first step I would say for people to do is to look on a brand's website and see if there is anything about sustainability or ethical sourcing on it. And then if there is, is it a few lines and is it just lots of buzzwords
that sounds good? Is there any evidence given by that brand that actually backs up the claims that they're making, So do they just say a whole lot of good stuff or do they actually put evidence in their report about their impact or on their website about their impact.
And the other thing to keep an eye out for as a consumer is certifications.
So these are third party accreditations that a brand can get in terms of their environmental impact. So you could look for something like the Global Organic Textile Stamp, which kind of shows that this is a third party coming in and assessing that supply chain or that production process and saying yes, that is complying. So in those cases, you're not having to just believe what a brand says.
You're actually able to take that third party endorsement.
And there's a number of different certifications like that, So I think that's a really helpful thing to look for as well.
How do we end this because asking consumers to stop buying from these retailers isn't working. Look, we've gone from fast fashion to now ultra fast fashion. Do we need government intervention? What have other countries done?
This is a really complex issue to solve, So when we look at it, there's some significant.
Players that all have power, so I think we all need to take action.
The government is one of those players, and so in other countries there are different types of legislation that are in place to try and address this issue. So some of those pieces of legislation are import or export bans.
There are some examples of this in recent years when it has come to the state sanctioned force labor taking place in China's cotton industry. Some countries have put.
A ban in place that says if there is any suggestion that a product is linked to that particular region in China and that forced labor, then you can't import it into the country. So that's what some countries are doing, and others have what we often call modern slavery legislation or supply chain reporting legislation, which mandates that companies have.
To take action at the moment.
In New Zealand, for example, a company legally doesn't have to do anything about exploitation and its supply chain. It might happen or obligations to do something, but no legal requirement. And so in New Zealand, the first thing that we could do is require companies to have a look at how they're producing their products and whether there's any risk in modern slavery taking place. Then they had to disclose that to the public and then ideally you'd have legislation
which also compels them to take action. And so TFN has been working with the government on that for a number of years and we're really hopeful that we will see that kind.
Of legislation introduced.
We have no modern slavery legislation in New Zealand. We want them to introduce modern slavery legislation that includes due diligence requirements, which means that you don't just have to disclose where your risks are, but actually address and mitigate them.
But there isn't.
Any law so far that tells you to examine or scrutinize your supply chain to identify where there could be these risks of modern slavery taking place.
You've also got companies which can take some responsibility in action. So there are a bunch of things that the un guiding printsos on business which actually state that it is the end brand or that end companies responsibility to ensure that human rights aren't being abused in the process of producing their clothes or their products.
And so we actually need to see companies changing.
How they operate because at the moment, companies are able to just externalize the human cost of producing their clothes because they're not having to pay these work as well, so they can get away with it.
And that's not okay.
And so we need to kind of like fundamentally change the way that these companies work so that we don't have a system that lets us exploit people in the planet to give us cheap products.
That's a really big thing to change.
And then the other thing is that consumers do have power, and I know that it is really hard for us to make different choices when there's lots of financial pressure on us. I guess people are under various degrees of pressure. So I think we would really encourage people. If you can afford not to shop at Timu and other fast fashion companies, then don't make a different choice. Because these companies rely on consumer demand, and consumer demand drives the
whole ultra fast fashion model. So the most powerful thing that we can do to disrupt this system is to reduce the amount that we are buying from these companies. And when you take all of those things together, the government, businesses, consumers, then you can start to make a dent in this issue. But any one of those things alone is not going to create the change that we want to see.
I find it partning as well. I don't know about you, but this new generation coming through there is a trend towards ventage shopping and secondhand fashion and things like that. Do you reckon that we're slowly getting it?
I'd like to think so.
I think that the generation that's the generation younger than myself are so much more aware of the impact of their actions, and they're so much more connected to issues of justice or injustice around the world, so much more aware of issues of the environment and climate and of people being exploited. And so I do think that as you know, we see that generation grow up, I hope that they can hold those ideals close as they grow up and that we can start to see a real shift in how consumers operate.
And you know what I actually hate seeing as well, that I'm seeing more and more online is that local brands, so those ethical brands from all over the world, really they come up with a unique design, they show their process from start to finish, they explain their costs. It's a really big thing on Instagram and stuff now to see the breakdown of what your garment actually costs to make, but then you constantly see them saying, oh, it's another day,
this design has been stolen by XYZ. Sometimes they use the same photos and it's the same images, but one is thirteen dollars and the other is three hundred dollars. It must be just so disheartening for those small brands to see that and think why.
Yeah, I think you're right.
It's very difficult for small companies to compete, both with the machine that is fast fashion or ultra fast fashion. I think we should really respect those companies which are sticking to their values and producing clothing in a way that's not exploiting people, because it would be the easy choice for that company to try and take its price down a little bit to be more competitive. But yeah, I think we should as much as possible give our
support to companies like that. It feels like a lot to spend, you know, one hundred and eighty dollars on a dress or something, but the reality is people would easily spend one hundred and eighty dollars, like on a whol of clothing from a fast fashion brand and not like half of it where some of it only once throw it out, and really that same amount of money would be much better spent on the consumer's behalf buying, you know, one piece of clothing that's going to be
a staple in their wardrobe for years to.
Come thanks joining us.
Claire Small and local designers are arguing that imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery as more and more of their designs make their way onto the mega fast fashion websites. Swedish brand h and M filed a copyright lawsuit against she In, and complaints have poured in from other designers like America's Chrome Hearts and French brand Mason Cleo. And it's not just happening overseas either. Here in New Zealand, Auckland store Crushes accused retailer Glassons of copying a T
shirt design. Co owner of Crushes, Rose Hope is with us to discuss the importance of buying vintage and local. First off, Rose, I know how incredibly popular Crushes is. It's on cutting a hubitode in Auckland, and you guys sell vintage wears and also New Zealand made stuff as well. How important is it for people to consciously make those choices rather than go down, say the fast fashion round.
I think it's incredibly important because at the end of the day, we have to consider what kind of world we want to be living in. Like the trade off between quality and presses something that we have to you know, our throughout it's so easy to break and it's filling up our landfill. We've got so much of it. We don't even know what to do with it. We don't
even look after our goods anymore. But I also would argue it's something that people seem to be really ready for because when they come in and they feel the quality of our goods or hear the story about who makes what and why, there really is like a joy to pardtake in something that's honest. You know, it's almost novel now, which is a bit sad to say, but there's a great thing. Someone really enjoy a product instead of just participation in a trend or buying putting on a whim.
Yeah, and you guys really advocate as well to mend clothes also, which is something that I think that we've all forgotten about. That's the thing.
Yeah, I think if you own something and you choose to put some money towards it, therefore your responsibility it's kind of like what do you do with your households trash? You know, like are you a recycler? Are you? What kind of person are you? And what kind of responsibility
do you have towards the things that you own? And so we put on workshops for mending as well as putting on evains like the Akland Clothes Swaps where we get five hundred people through to like re exchange their goods and extend that life cycle of clothing.
In terms of those ultra fast fashion retailers and the fast fashion retailers. How disappointing is it when you see someone's designs like yourself, like crushes show up on some of these websites.
It's so disappointing. And I've got so many of my colleagues and like the creatives of Auckland have all been affected by just someone coming in and taking a design. In New Zealand, it's so small use here everything as well, So it's like I know someone who's at the HQ who's seen my friend's design on the mood board. You know, I've ripped it off before the company could rip it off. So I think what people need to understand is we're so close to each other that it's not merely coincidence
that these things happen. It's like genuinely and deliberately feeling a design. And then where does that leave us that put in the hard work and you know, pay people feeling to create it. Yeah, it really makes a cushion whether you should continue with the design it or have been completely devalued.
Because I know that you on the Crash's TikTok mentioned that a fast fashioned New Zealand retailer ripped off one of your designs.
It went quite viral. Lessons ripped us off. Whether you think the designer is close or not. I was infinitely better when it's made in New Zealand. Two it's embroidered.
Three we use secondhand, vintage dead stock blanks.
Literally, no questionable exploitative labor laws were crossed to make this.
It's as local, as ethical and sustainable as fashion can be. Instantly you value our work.
Were you surprised that it did get such a reaction?
I was surprised, to be honest. I made the video while I was feeling everything, you know, and then kind of went out for an hour and then came back
and my phone was blowing up. Then the response was so positive and so many people chose to purchase the original design from us, and so it was kind of even though it was a very disappointing experience, it was super hetwarming being able to explain in a video of what the difference is that we make ours locally on seeking hand dead stock T shirts and our manufacturing it hurt nobody and exploded nobody, and for only I think
eighteen dollars more you could get the original. It's not even much more expensive than something that has hurt so many people in the planet along the way. And so whether it was a deliberate coffee or just a coincidence, who knows. But the fantastic thing is it really pointed out that these identical pieces really had so much that differently checked themselves from one another, and that everything that it stands for, and it was just great to get that many eyes on those differences.
Thanks for joining us, Rose.
That's it for this episode of the Front Page. You can read more about today's stories and extend of news coverage at enzid Herald dot co dot nz. The Front Page is produced by Ethan Seals, Patty Fox, and Richard Martin.
Are the sound engineers. I'm Chelsea Daniels.
Subscribe to the front page on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts, and tune in tomorrow for another look behind the headlines.