Fashionable Ethics: Complexities and Calls for Change
For many fashion brands, ethical initiatives offer the promise of enhancing brand reputation, satisfying consumer demand, and meeting regulatory requirements. However, empirical research suggests that the success of an ethical transformation depends on more than just governance commitment, but also on the interconnectedness of systems, stakeholders, and ethical frameworks across the entire value chain.
“Fashionable Ethics: Exploring Ethical Perspectives in the Production, Marketing, and Consumption of Fashion,” a special issue of the Journal of Business Ethics, provides a rich framework that illustrates this point. The authors introduce the challenge of implementing ethical practices as follows:
“Fashion is simultaneously enthralling yet exploitative, replete with a multitude of ethical issues along the entire value chain from production and marketing to consumption, incorporating labor exploitation, animal cruelty, environmental pollution, consumerism, cultural appropriation, objectification, under-representation, and discrimination.”
Why This Special Issue Matters
The editors note that “research on ethical issues in fashion is growing but is fragmented across diverse domains,” with “only a peripheral focus on ethics and limited application of ethical theories or frameworks to fashion’s ethical dilemmas.”
This special issue deliberately “brings together diverse domains and unpacks salient ethical issues using the lens of ethical theories and frameworks” to better balance “social justice with environmental responsibility, addressing consumerism and new forms of greenwashing, cultural appropriation, objectification, under-representation, and discrimination.”
Across nine papers, the authors mobilize deontology, virtue ethics, Confucian virtue ethics, contractualism, and related perspectives to analyze how real actors — employees, entrepreneurs, consumers, and suppliers — navigate ethical tensions in production, marketing, and consumption.
Production: Ethics Under Pressure
On the production side, the special issue emphasizes that “the complex nature of global fashion supply chains presents significant ethical challenges, particularly in terms of traceability, transparency, and the multi-tiered structure of these networks,” with most production “concentrated in the Global South where cheap labor is abundant” and “institutional voids” undermine worker protection.
Both developed and developing countries have systemic issues such as exploitative working conditions, “modern slavery,” environmental damage, groundwater depletion, and waste colonialism — which is a new form of colonialism in which waste and pollution are used to dominate a group of people in their homeland. These challenges are presented as systemic outcomes of current business models rather than isolated abuses.
The special issue emphasizes that brands cannot limit their responsibility to their employees. For fashion brands to embrace ethical practices, they must prioritize the safety, security, and livelihoods of their suppliers and workforce — the most vulnerable members of the fashion supply chain.
It also highlights how crises expose structural injustices. During the pandemic, widespread cancellations and payment defaults threatened established supply chains and imposed severe economic and social pressures on vulnerable workers.
Newer phenomena, such as “techwashing,” exemplify how brands misrepresent or exaggerate technological advancements to appear more innovative or sustainable than they truly are. Meanwhile, corruption and opaque procurement practices further erode trust and fairness.