Cotton Courage | Katharine Hamnett

In the 80s she was the big star of the fashion world: Katharine Hamnett. Wham’s „Go-Go Shirts“ were her oeuvre. She signed photographers like Ellen von Unwerth or Jürgen Teller first. She had shows in Japan and Paris, her clients were Madonna, Princess Diana or Boy George. She had everything. But still, it became quiet around her, the former fashion star in the British pop sky. But there is a reason for that. Katharine Hamnett started to look behind the scenes of the glittery fashion world. And what she saw isn’t beautiful at all: inhuman production conditions, 18-hour shifts without a break, deaths caused by pesticides, slavery wages, etc. We talked to Katharine Hamnett about cotton and fashion that can be worn without a guilty conscious.

You kind of invented the slogan-T-shirt back in the 80s, thinking of shirts like “Choose life” or “Save the Whales” or your major success with T-shirts for Frankie goes to Hollywood. What was your intention? Was it already political or more a pop phenomenon?
It was a way of using the enormous amount of media coverage that fashion gets, to put some of my messages out there to the general public. I mean fashion gets so much publicity that it’s almost disgusting. So I thought I’d put this to good use and send some political, social messages out there on T-shirts: messages people need to be aware of, which might make them think, talk to each other and maybe even generate some action. It was like giving myself a voice, which was needed in view of the incredibly repressive Margaret Thatcher running our country back then. But also, it was a totally different time. American buyers were rushing into my showroom, willing to get spent their money. They took one look at the T-shirts, got a horrified look in their eyes, spun around on their heel and left. Now you could say these things and nobody would give a shit, or at least I thought that we had gotten that far. But actually, we now have a law against political contentious T-shirts in England, which means you could be sent to jail for your comments for six months. But that’s wrong, isn’t it? That is not exactly freedom of speech.

So it was first a political thing. But on the other hand your T-shirts were not produced under environmentally friendly conditions. You even invested in harmful things like stonewashing denim. When did you start thinking about ethics and ecology in fashion? What made you think differently?
In fact, we didn’t think we were doing any harm. So we didn’t really realize the impact of clothing and textiles on the environment until 1989, when I did some research on the social and environmental impact of the clothing industry and found out how bad things were. So I tried to change the way people where working in the fashion industry, which was very difficult, because they didn’t want to. Of course I thought that if they found out that a million people are dying per year of accidental pesticide poisoning, they would think: ‘Oh my God, we’ve got to use organic cotton.’ But nobody wanted to take on any responsibility.

So, the biggest problem was that people were not listening to you. Or was it that they didn’t react to what you were saying?
It’s not that I couldn’t talk to them or that they weren’t listening. You can have lunch with them every day, but still they won’t be interested. They just don’t care. I mean, I had a conversation with an English minister this year. about the fact that the only way that we can make sure that the consumer is truly informed would be to have a legislation for all goods on a EU level that conforms with environmental and ethnical labor criteria. All he had to say was: ‘That would harm British business.’ So we have a big problem here, because it means that business can just exist on the back of slave labor, enforced and unpaid overtime, absence of a trade union, unregulated pollution. That’s pretty shocking.

I guess in situations like these you sometimes get the feeling that it is all useless. Has there ever been anything like the hardest moment in your struggle to change the industry?
Personally, when I went to Mali with Oxfam in 2003 and saw what was actually happening: babies dying of starvation at the breast of their mothers and all because of an industry that won’t change and that told me to ‘Fuck off’. At that point, I had just enough and thought: I have to help these people on my own, which means driving up the amount of organic cotton, so that more farmers can make a living by raising it. So I changed strategies and concentrated on the consumer. I talked to my friends, my cleaner, my lawyer, anybody I knew and told them what was happening in the cotton industry. And they were absolutely horrified; their reaction was the same as mine. And these are my allies. I think people just need to know where their money goes and that they are entitled to a choice and I know that they will make the right one, because that is what is happening just now. Suddenly there is an enormous increase in consumer awareness, concern and activism. People don’t want clothes that have been made in an environmentally harmful manner or made by people who are forced to work overtime. They don’t want slave labels, they don’t want sweat labels, they don’t want child-labor labels. Even if the government and industry don’t listen to the designers: if it comes from the consumers, they have to take notice or lose market share.

You cancelled most of your licenses in 2004 after you found out about the conditions under which your clothes were being produced. Wasn’t that very threatening? I mean, it could also have ruined your business?
Mortal suicide, somebody said. I mean I now live on very little money and I sold my big house to put the money into my business. But for me it is important to feel good with what I am doing. I just couldn’t live with myself having lots of money, but living on the backs of people who get paid 13 cents an hour. Then I’d rather be poor.

You changed your production criteria and launched Katharine E Hamnett (E stands for being manufactured ethically and environmentally) in 2006. Where do you produce and what are the conditions for this production?
At the moment our T-shirt line is produced by two cotton mills in India. They don’t just produce organic cotton, but also build schools and housing, have a research station for new uses of organic material use and a engineering university to give their workers education. So the working conditions are way above the Ethical Trading Initiative Labor base code; they pay people properly and now they are thinking about running their own power station using solar energy rather than oil or gas. Besides, what is also important is that we do our shipping by sea and not by air, that our packaging is made exclusively for recycled material and we just have an online store, which is an environmentally friendly way of selling. A very beautiful set up, I would say. We are also working on a line of environmental shoes, actually vegan sneakers. So we are trying to do the very best we can. I’m quite demanding.

And what brought you together with TESCO, the big supermarket chain, as a retailer for one of your organic lines? I guess there have also been some people who didn’t understand it at all.
You know, at the beginning I thought I was walking into the jaws of hell, because they really have a bad reputation. But if it is a case of helping the farmers and we can do it with TESCO and we will be successful, then they will be ordering tens- or hundreds of thousands of tons of organic cotton, and the only thing I want is to drive up the demand for the farmers so that maybe more farmers will convert from conventional to organic cotton. Because if they do, they will have a 15 percent increase in income and they will go from starvation to a sustainable, economically developing and independent situation.

How do you feel about other major brands, who are also producing a small organic line or an organic jeans style?
Fantastic. The more, the better. If there is more demand, more farmers can convert. Today organic cotton only represents 0,1 percent of the global cotton production and there are 400 million farmers in the developing world. This helps the farmers.

Do you think that after all, these changes will continue and people will still care about environmental and ethical conditions in a couple of years? Or is it more a current hype bubble?
I really think that there has been an honest and important shift. Something is happening with the consumers that never happened before. They are waking up realizing that they have more power as consumers than they do as voters, because industry runs the government. And if the government doesn’t listen, industry certainly does. It’s like a sleeping giant just waking up. And that’s great and will not go “out of fashion”, because if people start to care about millions of people dying of pesticide poising every year then they are not going to stop caring all of a sudden.

Why is it so hard to make good looking organic clothes?
That’s a bit of a concept problem we have. People think it has to look horrible to be organic and that’s not true. If you look at all the clothes before 1840, all of them are organic. Actually the secret is: it does have to look like fashion to be successful.

Text > Nicole Urbschat

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