Essay
NoVaaEthical Fashion Dimensions: Pictorial and Auditory Depictions Through Three Culture Perspectives
The article is an explanatory study comparing the attitudes of young fashion conscious consumers towards ethical fashion in Canada, France and the United Kingdom. The study includes cross cultural research done by the methods of forming focus groups, interviewing students from universities, and analysis of mood boards created by interviewees. Due to fast fashion manufacturing costs have been lowered and the increased pressure by consumer demand for cheaper fashion items has led to sacrificing of ethical standards so that they can remain competitive in the fashion industry.
Although awareness of ethical issues has increased and the consumers are sympathetic towards the ethical issues but the visual appearance of the garment strongly influences the purchasing intention of the garment as opposed to its ethical credentials. This article will help address the gap by actually providing results of the research which compare the attitudes towards ethical fashion of apparel consumers in these three countries.
The findings show that the consumers of UK generally thought that ethical clothing would be expensive however Canadians didn’t think the same, they thought ethical clothing would be less available. The Canadians didn’t want to pay an extra price for the garment being ethical while French consumers were willing to pay and extra price if it fulfilled as a redemption for other bad behavior. Some consumers mentioned that if the other important criteria was met by the garment they would be willing to purchase an ethical garment while some were confused about the meaning of ethical fashion thus were uninterested in buying it at all. While some people thought of ethical garments as “dull” or “boring” the others said they would boycott a company if they were made aware of its unethical practices.
The article also has some limitations and scope for further research. As the participants of the study were a small group of homogeneous people who were in the same age bracket ( 18-26) and broadly belonging to the same socio-economic and educational backgrounds, the information derived may not be a very good representative of the diverse market of that county. Also the cross cultural nature of the research required to translate data from French to English which might not be as accurate as thought.
Phau, I., Teah, M., & Chuah, J. (2015), Consumer attitudes towards luxury fashion apparel made in sweatshops, Journal of Fashion Marketing and Management, 19 (2), 169-187.
The motivation of this study is to let more people have more understanding on how consumer attitudes play a significant role in luxury fashion apparel which was made in sweatshops in the developing countries. And also can use the hypothesis extension to population, not only in Australia, but also for other countries of different socioeconomic groups which may produce different results.
The benefits are high profits and low price for production. This article reports that only 1% of apparel production practices “ethically made apparel” of the 1 trillion global fashion industry. This means that there is a huge sustainability problem in the fashion industry that needs to be addressed. Also, the increasing apparel consumer demands also increase the demand for consumer information for ethical manufacturing practices from fashion companies. This make more people recognized that ethical branding strategy should be utilized in the future to maintain sustainable development in the society.
The framework used in this article was Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), to examine consumers’ attitudes towards luxury fashion apparel brands made in sweatshops.
In this quantitative article, the authors gathered data by conducting a “mall intercept” self-administered questionnaire. They did this by preparing the interviewer and approaching every fifth person who passed by the mall entrance. The data collection was over a period of three weeks, both during weekdays and weekends. Out of 260 questionnaires, 63 were incomplete and eliminated and only 197 were used for analysis using SPSS software. % were male, 51% were female and the majority of respondents were ages 21-35, with earnings less than $15,000/yr.
The survey instrument used was a seven-point Likert Scale to measure and analyze how attitudes(3 dimensional), social norms (3 dimensional), and perceived behavioral control- 1 dimensional (PBC) affect “intention not to purchase luxury branded apparel made in sweatshops” and how significant it is towards “Willingness to pay more for luxury branded apparel not made in sweatshops”.
From all 17 Hypothesis, eight were found supported (H1b, H3b, H3a, H2a, H6b, H8a, H8b, and H9) and 9 were not supported (H1a, H2b, H4a, H5a, H6a, H7a, H4b, H5b, and H7b).
After looking over the 17 hypothesis, some of the practical implications of this article may be that consumers who are aware of luxury brands who use sweatshops are willing pay a higher price for luxury items not made in sweatshops. This can lead to luxury brands having an option to implement “super-premium” prices and also may be able to create an “exclusiveness” of the luxury brand and strategically create a niche-market.
The limitations of this study could be that the sample population was too small, authors could have gathered more data by staying longer than 3 weeks, or by not waiting until the fifth person to walk in through the doors. The sample was not representative of the general population because the majority of respondents were probably not aware of the issue at hand (Phau et al, 2014).