The word "ethical" is doing a great deal of work it was never meant to do. And most of that work benefits the person using it, not the person it claims to describe.
Here is what "ethical fashion" means in practice: it means that somewhere in the supply chain, there is a maker, usually in the Global South, often on the African continent or in South or Southeast Asia, whose labour and skill have been deemed worthy of acknowledgement rather than concealment. The brand has visited the workshop. They have photographed the smiling artisans. They have written the copy about fair wages, traditional techniques, and community impact. They have priced the garment accordingly, at a premium that the brand largely retains, in a market the maker will never shop in, and they have sold it to a consumer who feels, having purchased it, that they have done something good.
This is not a critique of good intentions. It is a critique of the framework that makes those intentions necessary in the first place.
The word "ethical" exists in fashion because the industry’s default, its unexamined, unremarked-upon standard, has historically been unethical. Exploitative wages, stolen references, appropriated aesthetics, and manufacturing conditions that no consumer would tolerate if they could see them. "Ethical fashion" is the exception that the industry presents as progress, without ever fully interrogating why it is exceptional. If paying a maker a fair wage requires a marketing campaign, something has gone very wrong with what we consider normal.
There are people genuinely working to change this. Designers, buyers, policy advocates and co-operatives are trying to restructure how the industry distributes power and profit. That work matters. But the label "ethical fashion" has become a shield for the mainstream, not a tool for those reformers. It allows business as usual to continue undisturbed while a subcategory absorbs the scrutiny.
African fashion is not ethical fashion. Kente weavers are not ethical producers. No one calls an Italian atelier "ethical" for paying its pattern cutters; they call it a fashion house. A Lagos-based designer who sources her fabric from Aso-oke cooperatives and employs tailors at rates commensurate with their skill is not practising ethical fashion. She is running a business. She is participating in an economy. She is doing exactly what every fashion house in Milan, Paris and New York does. The difference is that her business has been assigned to a subcategory that implies it requires a moral qualifier to be taken seriously.
The subcategory is the problem. It creates a hierarchy in which African fashion is positioned as virtuous rather than excellent, as conscientious rather than technically superior, as good-for-you rather than simply good. It also circulates within African and diaspora markets, used to premium-price locally made goods to local consumers on moral grounds, rather than on the grounds of quality, craft, and cultural knowledge, which are the actual arguments.
We are interested in taste. We are interested in construction, silhouette, concept, longevity, and the kind of quality that does not require a supply chain audit to justify its price. We are interested in African fashion on the same terms on which we discuss any other fashion: as a creative and commercial enterprise made by skilled people who know exactly what they are doing.
If you want to talk about ethics in the industry, that is a necessary and important conversation. But have it about the whole industry. Have it about the houses whose runway garments are manufactured in conditions they would rather not disclose. Have it about the trend cycle that depletes resources, borrows without credit, and discards in six weeks what took a craftsperson six months to make.
Have it about everything. Or stop using the word as a selling point for the exception and a shield for the rule.
African fashion is fashion. Treat it accordingly.
