Ethics in fashion as a social problem: Ethical fashion in Poland

Abstract

Abstract At the beginning of the twenty-first century the issues concerning natural environment protection began to be associated with the concepts of social responsibility and corporate social responsibility, and the idea of sustainability has become a criterion for operation assessment and a particular meta-narrative. For over two decades these issues have now been also associated with the garment industry. Although in other western countries, these subjects have long been recognized as important social problems worth seeking solutions to, in Poland discussions regarding ethical fashion are still obscure. The subject of interest in this article is the analysis of the presence of ethical fashion in Poland and the shape of public discourse regarding this topic. The first part defines the concept of ethical fashion. The second part is devoted to a presentation of the most important entities and practices associated with ethical fashion in Poland and the attempts to establish how important these issues are for contemporary Polish people. The third part presents the results of the study on ethical fashion and its role in Polish public discourse, especially in the manners of framing and interpreting in Polish opinion-forming media the problem of the garment factory catastrophe in Bangladesh. The principal aim of the presented analysis is the attempt to provide the answer to the following question: are the issues of ethics and fashion industry responsibility perceived as a significant problem in Poland?