Ethical Fashion-The View from Argentina

The author of the article titled “Research Notes: Ethical Fashion-The View from Argentina” is Regina A. Root. The article was published on 21 April 2015. She has written, edited and co-edited The Handbook of Fashion Studies (Bloomsbury, 2013), Couture and Consensus: Fashion and Politics in Postcolonial Argentina (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) and The Latin American Fashion Reader (Bloomsbury 2005). She also directs Hispanic Studies at the College of William and Mary.

This article is mainly focus on fashion view in Argentina. Argentina located in south-eastern South America. The country is known for steak, tango and football. In her first paragraph text, she wants to highlight point of view from Argentina about Ethical fashion. Ethical fashion in Argentina context more to brutal period of dictatorship. It’s all about human rights issues which newspaper articles and fashion columns came up with the serious headlines that analyzing the country’s devastating human rights. The disappeared is the consequences from the “dirty war” that took place between 1976 and 1983 that military officials labeled the opposition as “subversives” and kidnapped, tortured, and murdered approximately 30,000 loved ones that known as the disappeared.

Consumer inspired “escrache”, known as a particular political demonstration that emerged in Argentina in the turn of the century by the organization H.I.J.O.S. The members of H.I.J.O.S. started the escraches as a way of showing to the community the presence of unpunished criminals of the dictatorship (1976-1983) or commonly known as public shaming that similar to the protest, that makes human suffering within the fashion industry more visible. Today’s organized “escraches” denounces slave and child labor associated with fast fashion brands. Fast fashion is a modern term used to describe how retailers try to capitalize on current fashion trends by manufacturing clothing much more quickly and inexpensively.

Popular fast fashion retailers today are companies like Zara, H&M, The Gap, Topshop etc.

Escrache occurred on April 13,  2013, outside a Zara store on Florida Street in Buenos Aires and condemned the Spanish fast fashion company for operating slave labor sweatshops. The protesters  gathered around an Argentina flags with signs announcing that tens of thousands clandestine workshops exists throughout the country. The group also projected onto storefront a film documenting the plight and conditions under which alleged sweatshop workers had toiled as attempt to make evidence visible.

Contemporary Argentine fashion design is increasingly at the forefront of Latin American ethical fashion. Alex Blanch (2013), co-founder of Raiz Disenso, a nongovernment organization focused on providing educational workshops to designers interested in ethical fashions design. He told that, “We try to avoid anything that an escrache would bring up light. This is to say, our mission is to impose a logic ethical consumption that avoids completely those business pratices that exploit workers and force them into sweatships conditions. One also has to prioritize the dissemination of values that promote ethical consumption and entrepreneurs who are making a difference.

Argentina designers and consumer are reimagining the terms of ethical fashion as a tool with which to counter the forces of global capitalism. Overall, I would recommend this article to someone that is fashion enthusiast because this article full of information and history about the ethical fashion in Argentina.