What is Ethical Fashion?

I found an interesting page on the V&A website asking the question What is Ethical Fashion?

Ethical Fashion covers a wide range of issues from working conditions, exploitation, fair trade, sustainable production, the environment and animal welfare.

It is the high street clothing companies that account for a massive proporation of Western retail. With globalisation, materials and labour can be used overseas to keep the costs low. Industrialised methods of growing cotton also allow fabric to be produced quickly and cheaply in large quantities. The saving is passed onto the customer providing low prices on the high street. This also then makes the clothing 'disposable' which provides us with another issue of sustainability.

Issues around ethical fashion:
*serious concerns about exploitative working conditions in factories
*Child workers and exploited adults can be subject to violence and abuse including; forced overtime, cramped and unhygienic working conditions, bad food, low pay.
*Cotton grown using 22.5% of the worlds insecticides and 10% of the worlds pesticides can be dangerous for the environment and for the farmers that grow it.
*Textile practises aren't entirely sustainable doing damage to the immediate enviroment. E.g. the Aral Sea in central Asia has shrunk to 15% of it's former volume due to it's water being used for cotton production and dying.
*Chemicals that textiles are treated with can be toxic to the environment. The most dangerous are; lead, nickel, chromium IV, aryl amines, phthalates and formaldehyde
*Low costs and disposable fashion mean landfills and incinerators are being increasingly filled and used. (The UK alone throws away 1 million tonnes of clothing each year)
*Animals are farmed to supply fur for the fashion industry. Stella McCartney is someone who is against this and does not use leather or fur in her designs.

Above are a list of the key issues that High street brands need to address. Particularly in terms of this 'disposable fashion'. From trying to create cheap clothing, all these other issues are arriving and is it really worth it? Most of the time cheap clothing isn't better for consumers anyway, it falls apart within a wash. Wouldn't it make more sense to create quality in clothing and spare the lives of slaves alongside this?

Reference: http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/w/what-is-ethical-fashion/