Centring the Animal: Collective Fashion Justice
Earlier this month, news flew through the animal rights community: Bulgaria had just become the latest country to end fur farming. “Following immense pressure, a historic order has been signed which will mean that no more fur farms will be able to operate in the country,” said Connor Jackson, founder of campaign group Open Cages, which had taken part in the campaign. “Animals should never have to suffer and die in a tiny cage just for a piece of fur. These foxes and minks should be free to live and explore the open wilderness, safe from a fur farmer's cruel hands.”
But while the relief was deeply felt, the victory is bittersweet. Because of outdated notions of its association with luxury and wealth, fur has been a (comparatively, but still tough) win for those concerned with animal rights in fashion. But the truth is, fur represents only a fraction of animals who give their lives to the industry. If, every year, one hundred million animals are bred and killed for fur, over 1.4 billion cows, calves, buffaloes, goats and pigs are killed for leather - and the suffering and the injustice is no less in this industry.
Why one is banned while the other continues unchecked is a product of an awful cognitive dissonance. Increasingly, however, raising animals, for food or fur, is being recognised for its ethical as well as its climate and ecology-wrecking issues. Global campaign group Collective Fashion Justice is currently the only advocacy group that adopts a 360 approach to justice in the supply chain - by including its most marginalised constituents, animals. Its time is long overdue. I spoke to founder Emma Hakansson about the campaign to create a total ethics system.
Bel: Would you give us some background on Collective Fashion Justice?
Emma: It’s still new, just two years old. It exists to create a total ethics fashion system, one that values the life and wellbeing of people and animals before profit and production. You and I were speaking about [the need for] degrowth just now. Degrowth is definitely a part of our approach because it's just not possible to value all of those things in the way the industry exists now.
The way we try to address the industry is by looking at the supply chains that have non-human animals in it, because that's where people, planet and animals can be hit at once. We lend our voice and support issues around like garment workers but if we can talk about leather, we can also talk about tannery work and slaughterhouse workers and cattle and deforestation and indigenous people.
Bel: You work across different groups.
Emma: Yes, we speak to citizens as well as people in brands and in fashion. And we speak to policy makers. Change has to happen at all those levels. Citizens or consumers can’t do it all - but we still have to be aware we're part of something deeply problematic. Collective Fashion Justice has free educational resources to help people understand that they don't need to buy something new every week; and that, if they are buying [new], these are the things they need to consider. For brands, for issues like corporate social responsibility, we release reports - including one last year, called Shear Destruction: Wool, Fashion and the Biodiversity Crisis, on the wool industry, specific to its environmental impacts. The wool industry has cleverly created a false dichotomy that you either wear wool or you wear plastic, and that's not the case. And they're using that to push an industry that is terrible for sheep.
We use reports like this as a resource base for people to pull from but to speak to brands with. We're talking to a big brand at the moment who, based on that report, started to ask “which of our materials are causing the most emissions for our business?” They discovered that one of them was wool - even though they hadn’t considered that might be the case. So we're talking about moving away from that. That’s always an interesting discussion, because it’s not simply about swapping these materials for something ‘better.’ But we can only do so much at once and there are definitely goalposts to move.
Bel: Your open source digital booklet ‘total ethics fashion: a primer” is a great launchpad into all the dozens of issues in fashion where social justice, animal justice and environmental sustainability overlap. And on a policy level?
Emma: So, yes, on a policy level, we work on issues like fur bans but we also helped pass legislation in New York last Climate Week around sustainable textile purchasing. We’ve consulted with some of the senators behind the New York Fashion Act and will continue to try to get biodiversity more embedded in the Act. At the moment, it’s very emissions-focused.
Bel: Collaboration is important to you.
Emma: It can be a little lonely. People tend to think: ‘oh, this is an animal rights organisation, pretending to be about other things’ - rather than seeing [these issues] as all-important. We can have animal activists on one side saying, you’re talking about sustainability and fair labour while, on the other side, there are people who feel sustainable fashion doesn’t have the space for ethical issues.
I’d like to collaborate with groups and help them bring [animal rights] into their work.There’s a huge disconnect between people who may consider themselves mostly focused on workers rights or mostly focused on climate or mostly focused on animals when they're all so connected and we need to be tackling it altogether.
Bel: As you know, I just don’t see how you can have evolved, compassionate society if it’s based on so much animal suffering. So I’d love to know more about your journey.
Emma: I’m 22. I’d been living in Sweden with my family and I was being fed heaps of moose and deer but I thought, I don’t want to eat THOSE animals. That became the ‘well, maybe we shouldn’t be eating any animals at all’ moment. Then I discovered that it’s not just meat that’s the issue and, one year later, at the age of 16, I became vegan. Once you're aware of one social justice issue, you realise that oppression is everywhere, in really interconnected ways. At the time, I was working as a model, which quickly became deeply problematic for me because of all the materials I was being made to wear. At the same time, I was learning about workers rights. I watched The True Cost and realised that everything about what I'm representing with my face was for money.
Initially, I went down a creative route with a creative production agency that produced content and helped brands that were doing the right thing show themselves to be worth supporting over brands that weren't doing the right thing. I made good connections but then I realised that that wasn't how I was going to bring about change in the industry.
I started consulting, talking with good brands about doing other good things. At the same time, I started working for an animal rights organisation where I learnt about more direct campaigning and investigations and pressure campaigning. Those two worlds just collided. I did some fashion-related animal rights campaigns but then I realised that the fashion industry is so concerned with visuals and prestige. It doesn't care what an animal rights organisation thinks and they don't want to be seen to care about that because we're below them. I realised that if I was going to change the industry, it needed to be coming from somewhere that seemed semi-part of it, even though we're constantly criticising it.
That was how Collective Fashion Justice came about. And also because I realised that I was being limited, working in an organisation that only covered part of what I cared about.
Watch Willow and Claude, an award-winning documentary which follows Emma Hakansson, along her search for a total ethics knitwear supply chain - and meet the sheep who inspired her.
Bel: What made you decide on ’total ethics fashion’?
Emma: I’m interested in how we ‘other’ different groups and decide ‘we’re humans’. Actually if we think of human, really we normally mean white people and normally men and normally able-bodied. So, it was through all of that and then just the consistent, actually love of fashion despite everything I hate about it that made me realise I needed to be talking about total ethics fashion. Because the ethical fashion [label] is put onto leather bags all the time. And all of those words are almost at the point of meaning nothing. We have a three circle Venn diagram that explains total ethics fashion. You asked how can we have a just society if we’re wearing and eating individuals. I also don't see how we can get people to care about workers’ rights if they're making clothes out of someone's skin. You can't just take out part of that problem without looking at the structure of oppression and power.
Bel: Describe your work with brands. How do you approach them?
Emma: I open with sustainability because people are more comfortable talking about that, without the ethics. We start by talking about emissions and land use, and then we look a brand’s animal welfare policy. Lots of brands refer to the Five Freedoms, which are out of date and just don’t work within animal agriculture. One of the five is the freedom to express natural behaviours but, if you’re keeping a wild animal that's native to Australia in a cage, how are you ever going to make sure that's possible? And you can't update that animal welfare policy to fix that so you just have to get rid of the use of that material.
People warm up to it because, you know, they’re people. I've had people really come around and follow the social media of Collective Fashion Justice and end up being big supporters. People have to come from where they are.
Bel: Do people simply not know what’s happening to animals, both in the food and in the fashion supply chains?
Emma: The most common one is in wool, when I ask people what they think about the fact that the sheep is slaughtered. And everyone's like, ‘Oh, no, but you just shear them. It's okay.’ But when you explain how the whole industry works, some people feel confronted. But that's a shocking thing not to know: that the wool industry is a slaughter industry. That’s a huge gap in knowledge.
Bel: That lack of awareness of the processes and the implied innocence of the outcome and the way it’s marketed: it reminds me of similar issues around milk production, where so many of us still fail to understand that a cow has to be pregnant and give birth before she’ll produce milk.
Emma: Yes. You can milk a cow and not slaughter her - but that's not what happens. And where do people think the babies go?
Bel: My own journey into veganism started with a film about the leather industry in China called My Fancy High Heels. It was an examination of both human and animal rights in China within the industry, and was pretty damning on both levels. Because of the speed slaughterhouse workers were working at, the cows appeared only partially stunned during skinning. But leather standards are all about chemicals. I notice you wrote a blog post about the Leather Working Group (LWG), which claims to campaign for better leather.
Emma: If you look at the website of the LWG (and the actual link you click on is Ethical Leather slash Leather Working Group), the standard only looks at tanneries. There’s nothing on slaughterhouses and they don't even do social auditing in the tanneries. I don't know how they can possibly think that that word ‘ethical’ is acceptable to use. The standards are crap; they're terrible.
That's one of the things we want to get onto people's minds: that slaughterhouse workers are fashion supply chain workers, too. We're working with a university to replicate, in Australia, a US study called “Slaughterhouse Workers and Increased Crime Rates”, which shows the link between violence towards animals - so trauma of animals going to workers who end up with like perpetration induced traumatic stress (PITS) - and increased incidences of domestic violence, sexual assault in their communities. There are so many women who buy into the fashion system who don’t see that last part of the system; they don’t understand that trauma is trauma is trauma. It’s an element I'm really interested in strengthening.
Bel: Yes, your campaign #WhoKilledForMyClothes, which ran alongside Fashion Revolution Week, and its hashtag #WhoMadeMyClothes, is so important. Being paid to kill frightened, helpless animals is one of the worst jobs on this planet.
I’ve also become concerned with the latent misogyny of the fashion industry, despite its self-portrayal as empowering and creative. Eighty per cent of garment workers are young women, separated from their families to work in dreadful conditions. Fashion for women is built on the backs of other women. Then, in leather, you have the exploitation of the mother cow and her calf and this dreadful outcome: that women are using the bodies of mother animals as their handbags and shoes, and that they’re using the bodies of the babies as calfskin wallets.
We need to bring in that hidden element, the animals, which is ironically and tragically a major element of what the planet is going through right now. Tell me about your new book “How Veganism Can Save Us.”
Emma: It’s very to the point. It’s more of an entry level primer looking at planet impacts and human impact and then it brings in the animals, who are at the centre of it all. I hope anyone who is interested in any kind of social justice reads it and then considers that this is a part of this world. Sub Human is double the length and it’s more political. You can graduate to that. It’s due out at the very start of 2024, which sounds so far away. I actually wrote that one first, but because it is more extreme of political, it took a lot longer to find it a home.
Bel: I think things are accelerating in terms of animal rights and awareness of what we’re doing to animals. The problem is, that eating meat has become normalised that people ignore the evidence of suffering.
Emma: Especially in the climate and environmental space, it’s very interesting [because animal agriculture has an enormous impact on both the climate and the ecological emergencies]. There’s a study coming out from a vegan academic with a background in animal ethics and climate science. They’re looking at other academics in the climate science space, who, by the numbers, recognise animal agriculture has to be ended but still ate animal products in their own lives. The question is: if we can't get climate scientists on board, how are we going to get anyone else?
