What I personally look for and support when it comes to fashion shopping, are committed brands. Committed fashion brands are ones that do just that: make an ethical commitment and are very transparent about it. They may not be doing every single thing right at this moment in time, but they’re making a very conscious and documented effort. One of my favorite brands Stella McCartney is a great example: the label crushes it with using biodegradable, vegan and vegetarian materials, however it is still working on reducing environmental pollution and complete factory monitoring to ensure fair treatment of workers; the efforts around both are well documented and publicly available on the stellamccartney.com site. A lot of my favorite Ukrainian brands crush it on the human rights factor creating tons of fair-wage local jobs, but still sometimes use leather as a material, committing to make the change in the near future.

Here is what to look for on the fashion brand’s website to make sure the brand is committed to ethical or improving ethical practices:

• Usually in the footer (that’s the navigation all the way at the bottom of the site) there will be a section titled “Ethics” or “Sustainability”
• Sometimes the brand will even have sections titled “BRAND NAME and the environment” or “BRAND NAME and fair trade”
• If the brand is truly ethical, they will have all this information right in the “ABOUT” section on the site (I mean, from a marketing perspective, a truly ethical brand will always want to show off this fact to their consumer)
• If none of this information is available, you can contact the brand via the contact form on the site and ask your questions around ethics to get answers from the source