I LOVE resolutions! My favorite day of the calendar is New Years Day. It comes around consistently, every year in fact, and regardless of how good or bad my choices have been the night or year before, it presents an incredible opportunity. Every single year, right on time, we're presented with a new chance to make changes to our lives. I’ve loved being the first one on the ski slopes at the very start of the year, or doing a long beach run while everyone else is still sleeping in. However, most of the time these grand ideals only last a moment or a matter of days. Occasionally we manage to extend it to weeks, as old habits and desires quickly return. Gym memberships are incredibly popular in January. February...March, not so much.
For me, New Years Day 2014 will forever be remembered as a massive turning point in my life. One of long lastly, profound change. I decided to ALL IN and gave away all of my clothes! All of them. I’d bumbled along for years trying to incremental changes as I entered into the ethical clothing sector, but I knew that the only way that I was going to live into my values as I wanted to, was to make a one-off dramatic change. After much deliberation and months of research my business partner and I decided to build a WHOLE new wardrobe of only ethically made clothes.
The reason for this, was the tragic reality of the sweatshop clothing sector. On Tuesday April 23rd, 2013, 1,134 workers did what most of us do every weekday: they went to work, to provide for their families. Tragically for them, the clothing factory that were working in, Rana Plaza, was not safe and they should never have been allowed in. When the electricity generators clicked on, the sudden shock led to the whole building collapsing, creating the biggest man-made disaster in apparel manufacturing history. Perhaps even more tragically, this wasn’t a one-off anomaly, but a reflection of the murky and awful business practices that are systemic in the modern-day clothing sector.
https://www.just-style.com/news/rana-plaza-garments-legal/ Credit: Bayazid Akter/Shutterstock.
Often, we think of slavery and oppressive working conditions as stories from a by gone age. Yet, the reality is that fast fashion, the incredible variety of low quality, incredibly cheap clothes, means that millions of people today work in conditions that should be socially unacceptable and left behind in the history books. You can read or listen more to the reality of the clothing sector in our book, I Gave Away All My Clothes: Living Out Values Through Social Entrepreneurship (available in all good book stores, as well as the bad ones!).
What started off as a simple new resolution, to align our purchases more with the values that we claimed to hold, developed into the social-enterprise that was to become Visible Clothing. As we wrote in the book and reflected on our decade long roller-coaster ride, it was incredibly powerful to be reminded of the individuals who lives were forever changed because consumers chose to spend their money in line with who they wanted to be.
Lots of us claim to be driven by values and caring about how we treat others is at the core of who we want to be. Yet, when it comes to clothing, we’ve been culturally programmed to accept outrageous working conditions as a “cost” of the industry. Why? If something is so cheap, and seems “too good to be true”, it probably is. Yet, when consumers decide that where and who they purchase their clothes from matter, lives are positively impacted forever.
For example one of our team members, Diya, was able to completely change her life with restored dignity and increased personal automy, she was able to escape and abusive homelife and leave the trap of extreme poverty, by working hard and simply being paid fairly. Kiara was able to implement the vision for her daughter to complete her education and enter into a world of choices and freedom that she had previously only been able to dream of.
New Years resolutions might not be your thing, but for many of us, the Christian calendar provides a similar opportunity for refocus and adjustments, hopefully improvements, to be more in line with who we want to be. I have a close family member who love Easter and all the symbolism that resurrection, new life, offers her. The Lenten season provides a unique opportunity to reflect on who we currently are and perhaps more excitingly, who we want to be. Every year, as we work through the holy week calendar and build up to Easter Sunday, we are encouraged to think about resurrection and the impact on our lives.
Have you ever personally reflected on resurrection in regards to your clothing? Have you reflected on how your clothing purchases and the impact that you can directly have on other people’s lives?! For a myriad of understandable reasons you might not want to go all in and give away all your clothes. However, all of us can decide what clothes what we want to buy or repurpose or reuse and live out values simple in what we choose to wear.