Recently I wanted to buy four or five new white T-shirts to wear under office clothing. I’m aware that fast fashion is an issue, and as I don’t often buy clothes, I was hopeful that I could find some more ethical options out there. After all, white T-shirts are a volume seller, so there should be options, right? I did a quick search, which brought me to this website: https://guide.ethical.org.au/guide/browse/guide/?cat=700&subcat=702&type=714. I tried searching under casual wear, and underwear, but not all of the brands I found were covered, so I broadened my criteria to simply look at the retailers who were selling white t-shirts. Below is a summary of what I found.

So, on the surface, nothing much to choose from, as the rankings look identical. But a quick check of the various retailers outlines why most of them hold this ranking of “C” (which translates to some praise and some criticism). In the ethical guide website, clicking upon each individual retailer listed gives more detail around where they are progressing and failing respectively. I’m not going to outline it here in detail, but suffice to say that there’s a lot of greenwashing going on. Some of these firms are doing their best to cut their carbon emissions and water use, but still using sweatshop labour. Others are much better on the labour front, but resist progress elsewhere. And some are quiet achievers, but their marketing of their achievements lets them down.

No surprise that department store Myer gets an F for its ethical score. I could not even find a single white T-shirt walking around the floor there, and checking the labels on offer, most of them ranked between D (criticism, sone praise) and F (only criticisms) across several categories. Myer is marketed as an upmarket retailer, so why would it sell such brands in an era of social media? In reality, what’s on offer should actually be considered to compete against the discount department stores like Kmart. There are many reasons why the share price has fallen from a peak of around $3.50 a decade ago down to around 60c now.

David Jones had better brands, but was similarly understaffed. There were a handful of brands, but nothing especially compelling. The Swanndri brand looked ethically good online, but $45 for a single T-shirt felt a bit steep. The Bonds product they offered was just squished into a plastic box, with nothing much mentioned on it.

At Sportscraft, the young lady was helpful, but she said that they had currently sold out of all white T-shirts. And despite the high price tag, they were flying off the shelves. She suggested I try David Jones (which I’d already seen). It was interesting to hear that such a basic good was moving, especially in light of current economic pressures.

H&M had quite a range of T-shirts, both crew neck and vee neck (which is what I wanted). I did ask the sales girl what the difference was, and she did her best to explain, but there was nothing much on the labels to indicate anything particularly ethical or sustainable about them. When I came back later and bought three T-shirts here, I discovered that H&M are trying to recycle other clothes as best they can, and if customers bring in a large enough bag of clothes, they get a discount voucher. So full credit to H&M for doing something visual that customers can actually see.

Big W, to my surprise, were actually selling organic cotton T-shirts. That’s great, as far as it goes, but if the other T-shirts were costing $15-20, then I suspected that this firm was not paying enough to its workforce. About what you’d expect from a discount retailer.

By this stage, I was thoroughly confused, so I actually searched for ethical clothing in my city. It brought up an independent store called Ghanda (https://ghanda.com/). I spoke to a young female staff member, who explained that they made everything in Victoria. This was in direct contradiction to the Made in Vietnam label. It turned out that the designing and printing was done in Australia. They had no vee necked T-shirts, but they have a reasonable story to tell ethically (even though they haven’t shown up in the guide as yet).

Finally, I checked out Gazman, not expecting to find any T-shirts in there at all. But when I asked, the middle-aged lady was very helpful and attentive. After several hours with virtually no assistance at all, I very much appreciated this. After a quick check of their website, I discovered that Gazman was owned by the same firm that owned female fashion brand Perri Cutten, which ranked at the “B” level (some praise, no criticism). Could I draw a direct parallel across? Maybe, maybe not, but even though there was little info, I felt confident that any firm which scored a “B” would look to implement similar outcomes across its varied brands. And so, I bought the final two T-shirts here.

What is my point in describing all of this? Well, a few things. First of all, that this exercise was more challenging than I’d expected it to be. I’m not sure what’s driving this outcome. Is it that COVID-19 has delayed some sustainability initiatives? Or is it that firms don’t want to promote what they are doing too blatantly in case they have to backtrack on any claims they have made? This is, after all, a high-volume, low-margin industry. Or is it just that white T-shirts are such a standard product that it hasn’t occurred to anyone that there is a different way to market them?

Secondly, it’s one thing to have a shiny website outlining all you are doing towards sustainability, but if customer-facing staff are either too busy or completely disengaged from the products they are selling, then many of your marketing efforts are being wasted.

What do you think? Is ethical fashion a misnomer? Or is too hard to move the needle if consumers don’t respond to your efforts in buying enough in volume?