Anti-Women? Try Fast Fashion. 🥴

Yesterday was International Women's Day. Despite being fiercely feminist, I was struggling to put a post together because I was troubled by the performative marketing by brands and corporations who actively participate in the diminishing of women. So I thought I'd share what I think it means to support women, today and every day.

Fast fashion is, amongst many things, in the business of exploiting women.

Brands and marketers and social accounts can post all the "Happy IWD, we support the ladies who work for us!" messages they want, but at the end of the day they are deeply complicit in a process that actively deteriorates the lives, safety, and freedom of women. These women - and make no mistake, it is primarily women and girls - who work in factories and facilities where ethical practices are not in place are in the employ of companies that have built a business around exploiting families in poverty.
 
In addition to exploiting female workers around the world, fast fashion is also designed to prey on - and, again, make no mistake, it is primarily women who are targeted - the worries women have drilled into them about being enough, being on trend, being up with the new, the different, the better.
 
And they collectively wrap it in fun colours and/or flouncy sleeves, say it's organic/sustainable/whatever (because that's terribly au courant atm and there are zero consequences for greenwashing despite the fact that fast fashion drives more climate impact than a world of international travel), and call it a day.

What Does Ethical Fashion Mean for Women?

For me, truly supporting women looks like this.

• Operations: Exclusively operating according to practices of ethical manufacturing, where all people are paid fair wages and work in safe conditions.
• Product: Designing products that aren't intended to be thrown out in 2 months, but will last your entire family and hold their value when it's time to resell.
• Marketing: Acting with integrity at all times, ensuring the things we say are unimpeachably true and not devised to seduce anyone into unnecessary consumption.
• Representation: Ensuring we act with a gender-inclusive approach, never being binary-focused and always allowing all identities to be as they are.
• People: Lifting up the women who work for us, advocating for their growth and encouraging learning and career progress, and ensuring we have a flexible work environment that isn't systemically designed to lift up people without family needs.
• Advisory: Seeing out women in advisory roles and refusing to be directed by traditional, patriarchal business models.

We sure aren't perfect but we are trying extraordinarily hard to do the right thing for our kids here. I want so much for our collective to be a part of creating change together - our choices define us and we've all been making them together for the last 15 years. With that I ask: I'd love to hear how you stand up to unsustainable, anti-women, fast fashion business models so we can share with our collective.

- Jacquelyn

PS: If you little ones need spring gear, you can trust that we are the best place to shop for them this season. And if they don't need it, please don't get it for the sake of getting it.