Editorial note: And who made your clothes?

This Sunday marks the third anniversary of the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory in Bangladesh which killed 1,133 and injured 2,500 garment workers, most of whom were women. But the deadliest garment factory disaster ever was just the peak of the iceberg. Many fast-fashion as well as luxury companies have a long history of sweatshop labour, dangerous working conditions, ethical and environmental issues raised in their supply chains accompanied by distraction marketing methods, empty promises and outright lies.

The fact is that many of the high street brands are sending out on the streets approximately 50 collections per year in order to deliver us the latest, the most fashionable items before anyone else does. Go for a walk through main shopping streets in Ljubljana, London, New York or Shanghai on any day of the week and you will see masses of people enticed by cheap price tags and the adrenaline rush of bagging a bargain. We all love a great deal, right?

The problem is that we have internalized the feeling that our work can be rewarded by buying more and more stuff and on the way gained unrealistic expectation of what fashion should cost and how much of it we deserve to bring home every month.

Harmony between comfort, practicality and style is the main concept behind Studio August’s design process. Particular importance is attached to careful choice of natural materials and attention to all steps of the manufacturing process. Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS) certified fabric mills and sustainable fabric fairs are the cornerstone of Studio August’s fabric sourcing.

Janja Videc operates socially responsible, local and sustainable. Avoiding the seasonal changes, brand is based on a monochromatic color scale, well thought tailoring and geometrically shaped patterns and is consequently wearable in many different ways, anytime of the year.

It’s true, brands must take individual responsibility for all the ethical and environmental issues raised in their supply chains, but only the collaborative effort of consumers will transform the industry. When the representatives of the Fashion Revolution, organisation that challenges the fashion industry to provide greater transparency, safer work places, fair pay and adresses its environmental issues, were asked how much has changed in the last three years, the findings weren’t really encouranging: “brands are still acting with impunity, they’re doing a lot of cosmetic work but none of the groundwork. When we spoke to garment workers at the Rana Plaza memorial last year, they said there was no difference to their working conditions.”

So what we can do? The easisest way to become more sustainable consumer is to resist buying things with impossibly low pricetags and avoid the buy-and-toss behaviour. Those clothes you bought impulsly might have been cheap to you, but once you add to them their real cost someone else had to pay, you see that cheap in fashion simply doesn’t exist.

Meanwhile, small independent brands with sustainable production models are becoming more and more available. They ignore the insane fashion cycle, create pieces that can be worn all year round or produce smaller collections per season. Beside a lot of them use recycled fibres and opting for sustainable options, like hemp, Tencel etc., unlike mainstream fashion that mostly uses elastics, nylon and polyester that contain plastic. And we all know that when thrown away, plastic does not compost – it sits in soil and floats in oceans forever. The small independent brands usually produce their clothing close to their stores, in their local environment and avoid the staggering CO2 emissions caused by shipping garments over the globe. So with every purchase you make you support craftsmanship in the region and enable your local designers to grow.