How Can A Fashion Brand Create Social And Environmental Impact

I recently spoke at the Social Enterprise Conference in Birmingham. One of the positive messages that were highlighted at this tw0-day event is the rise in socially aware brands that are creating change through sustainable and ethical practices. The recent Pulse of the Fashion Industry 2019 update report highlighted that 75 percent of consumers believed sustainability was either ‘extremely’ or ‘very important’ to them. Over 33 percent of shoppers revealed they switched brands to support those that back environmental change. 50 percent of consumers reported their intention to switch brands in favor of those embracing eco-friendly practices. People are questioning how things are produced and how they affect the world's ecosystem. Fashion is still one of the most polluting sectors in the world and so sustainable fashion is not a trend to highjack but a practice that should be at the foundation of any brand.

At the moment, the footwear industry doesn’t have a great reputation when it comes to being ethical or sustainable. Here are just a few statistics that highlight the scale of the problem:

* Less than 5 percent of waste from post-consumer shoes is recycled.

* Just 2 percent of the final price of a shoe goes to the workers who made it.

* 85 percent of the world’s leather is tanned using chromium, which is considered to be the fourth worst pollutant in the world.

Modern footwear is surprisingly damaging in various ways. As the pace of fashion has quickened people have begun buying more shoes and throwing them away more easily. Traditional shoe-crafting has given way to mass-production, eating up resources and sending an average of three pairs of shoes per person to the landfill every year. The quest for cheaper and faster production has also encouraged the exploitation of vulnerable workers through long hours, low pay and dangerous working conditions.

How can one address this?

One of the ways that the practices in the footwear industry are being addressed is through an increasing focus on vegan shoes. The vegan trend has quadrupled in the five years between 2012 and 2017.  It now gets almost three times more interest than vegetarian and gluten-free searches in Google. If the world went vegan, it could save 8 million human lives by 2050, reduce greenhouse gas emissions by two thirds and lead to healthcare-related savings and avoid climate damages of $1.5 trillion. In 2018, the UK launched more vegan products than any other nation. Over half (56 percent) of British people adopted vegan-buying behaviors and checking if their toiletries are cruelty-free, as per the research carried out by Opinion Matters for The Vegan Society between 14 and 16 July 2017 involving a sample of 2,011 UK adults.

The sociology of country music lyrics

With its lilting banjo, cowboy theme and lyrics like "Ridin' on a tractor" and "Wrangler on my booty", not to mention an extremely catchy refrain, Lil Nas X's "Old Town Road" should be a country-music hit. Yet it was kicked off the Billboard country-music chart for not embracing "enough elements of today's country music". Billboard later told Rolling Stone magazine that its decision to take the song off the chart "had nothing to do with the race of the artist". Lil Nas X, the 20-year-old African-American who blended hip-hop, rock and country in his earworm of a song, does not look like the typical country star. Those tend to be white, and most are male.

One of country music's greatest strengths is its ability to celebrate working folk in America. But that has also "been its greatest liability", says Charles Hughes, a historian and author of "Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South". A recent paper in Rural Sociology, an academic journal, examined how men talk about themselves in mainstream country music. Its author, Braden Leap of Mississippi State University, analysed the lyrics of the top songs on the weekly Billboard country-music charts from the 1980s until the 2010s and found that the near-routine depiction of men as breadwinners and stand-up guys has changed.

Over the past decade, more songs objectify women and are about hooking up. Mr Leap's examination of lyrics also found that masculinity and whiteness had become more closely linked. References to blue eyes and blond hair, for example, were almost completely absent in the 1980s. In the 2000s, they featured in 15% of the chart-topping songs.

Country radio is the genre's powerful gatekeeper. Country stations have not played Lil Nas X much until recently. Nor are they playing as many women as before. Jada Watson, of the University of Ottawa, recently found that in 2000 a third of country songs on country radio were sung by women. In 2018 the share was only 11%. Even the top female stars get fewer spins. Carrie Underwood had 3m plays between 2000 and 2018; Kenny Chesney received twice as many. A report from the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative found that 16% of all artists were female across 500 of the top country songs from 2014 to 2018.

A few black artists, such as Charley Pride, Darius Rucker and Kane Brown, have been successful. Some popular white artists have rapped on country ditties. Yet a young black man using similar imagery and sounds to those that dominate country radio stations gets little play. Lil Nas X's "Old Town Road" remix, which features Billy Ray Cyrus of "Achy Breaky Heart" fame, has topped Billboard's Hot 100 for eight weeks. Mr Hughes, the historian, says the fact that Lil Nas X "has had to force his way in is a real commentary on country music's long-term racial politics, which has always had a very uneasy relationship with blackness."