Faux Feminism: The Hypocrisy of Fashion’s Feminist Agenda

You don’t have to look far to see that there is a growing narrative around gender equality in a majority of fashion’s marketing and mission statements. At first glance, the growing global awareness of social inequities is a beautiful thing, hopeful even; but when it comes to putting preaching into practice, the clothing industry’s playbook is seriously lacking. Rather than weaving the fair and dignified treatment of women into their fabric and ethos, brands like Victoria’s Secret, Lululemon and Athleta have demonstrated, time and again, little to no regard in actually holding up these professed values.

Only empowering women that are your consumers, or potential consumers, isn’t empowering women.

One of the easiest ways for brands to latch onto and boost this pseudo-ethics is to leverage their clout on social media, where a pay-to-play algorithm blasts feminist messaging into the feeds of their followers and analytically curated demographics lists. Brands know that there is not a whole lot of fact-checking being done on social platforms, so a feel-good message can go a long way, regardless of if there are actions to support the marketing.

Women make up more than 70% of the fashion industry’s total workforce, thus representing the backbone of an industry worth almost $3 trillion annually. An estimated 60 million workers support this multi-trillion dollar cash cow, and 80% of that workforce are women.

Brands, trying to keep overhead low and boost profits, choose to source garment production from countries where labor laws are lax and easily exploited. When clothing companies place orders with factories, they offer rates that are so low that there is no way suppliers could pay a living wage to the women sewing the garments. As far as accountability, brands skirt it by factory subcontracting tactics. And this isn’t anything new. Gender inequality has been rampant in the industry since its inception and is notorious for its often abhorrent working conditions, meager wages with forced (often unpaid) overtime and little to no time off. In this broken system, the women garment workers also suffer gender-based violence on a regular basis.

Read the full article on Remake.