Hi it's Caroline!
A few days ago, while I was reserching for my next blog, I decided to look up fair trade clothing. In the aspect of fair trade, clothes are probably one of the worst offenders. See, people will go and buy fair-trade coffee, or chocolate, but clothes? Yeah... no thanks. I see their point, thant a lot people are super-picky about the clothes they wear, or have an allergy to materials used in some clothes. I think that the real difference is that most clothing brands don't offer fair- trade clothing, and people aren't going out and looking for fair-trade clothing. I know we've all seen "made in China" printed on the tag of our shirts at least once, but does it make you think? About those workers in China, making the clothes you're wearing now? It's probabaly not fair-trade made clothing, so the workers probably don't have safe working conditions or even minimum-wage pay. Just so you can wear that nice shirt to school one day. People ask, "Why don't they just stop working there?" Like Ginger mentioned in one of her blogs, they can't, because there is literally no other work where they live. So maybe, if we buy from fair-trade companies, say Ten Thousand Villages, over non fair-trade companies, like Gap, or Target, we can convince these non fair-trade companies to incorperate some fair-trade items. I'm not saying you all have to stop shopping at stores that aren't fair-trade, since, let's face it, fair-trade companies don't make every single thing that we use daily, but just switching over small things, like coffee, a fair-trade shirt, maybe some skin care products, is what really makes a difference :)
While I was reserching fair-trade clothing, I found the company Avatar Imports, an all fair-trade clothing company. This is probably one of my favorite things from there, thanks to the awesome owls on the front :)
