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| Clothes from Boohoo |
It is not so much the styling and colour, but the price of the £5 dress – reduced this week to just £4 – which attracts thousands of the thriving retailer’s 5 million UK customers to add it to their online shopping bag, click and pay.
Products and prices like these have driven Boohoo’s profits to a record £59.9m, bucking the trend of struggling high street fashion stores across the country.
Made in the UK, at factories in Leicester and Manchester, the £5 dress epitomises a fast fashion industry that pumps hundreds of new collections on to the market in short time at pocket money prices, with social media celebrity endorsement to boost high consumer demand. On average, such dresses and other products are discarded by consumers after five weeks.
Missguided, an online rival to Boohoo, which also sources products from Leicester, took the low pricing even further this week by promoting a £1 bikini, which proved so popular with customers that the website crashed.
But behind the price tag there is an environmental and social cost not contained on the label of such products. “The hidden price tag is the cost people in the supply chain and the environment itself pays,” said Sass Brown, a lecturer at the Manchester Fashion Institute. “The price is just too good to be true.”
A report by MPs into the fashion industry put it bluntly: in terms of environmental degradation, the textile industry creates 1.2bn tonnes of CO2 a year, more than international aviation and shipping combined, consumes lake-sized volumes of water, and creates chemical and plastic pollution – as much as 35% of microplastics found in the ocean come from synthetic clothing.
Socially, the booming fast fashion industry is often built on low wages paid to women working in factories abroad but also increasingly in the UK, in cities such as Manchester, Birmingham, London and Leicester. There is no evidence that factories in the Boohoo and Missguided supply chains pay illegal wages. However, some garment workers in Leicester are paid an average of £3 an hour – way under the national minimum wage – MPs heard in evidence.
MPs found that the Modern Slavery Act was not robust enough to stop wage exploitation at UK clothing factories. There was a lack of inspection or enforcement, allowing factories – none of which are unionised – to get away with paying illegal wages.
In the UK, we buy more clothes per person than any other country in Europe – five times what we bought in the 1980s, which creates 1.3m tonnes of waste each year, some 350,000 tonnes of which is dumped in landfill or incinerated.
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