The Week in Review

By Tamara Cincik

The UK is deep in the election countdown— but as we ponder which poll might hold a grain of truth and contemplate whether a young voter turnout will shift the margins, it’s interesting to review the news and see how the same stories are covered by different newspapers and media outlets, all of whom of course hold divergent political allegiances.

I urge all of you to do the same: from The Daily Mail to The Guardian, from The Telegraph to The Daily Mirror, I read them all and try to find the facts behind the fiction and see what is being said about the matters which are important to me. So what is important to me? I feel a shame in reading that we now have more foodbanks than McDonalds in the UK, that homelessness is up by 165% in the last 10 years and that in work poverty is epidemic. I feel overwhelmed by the utter lack of transparency of who made my clothes, how much the machinists were paid and whether they were children or adults working in unsafe factories.

This desire to distil what is needed for fashion to be the brilliant, inclusive and sustainable business it could be goes to the heart of what Fashion Roundtable do and our commitment to the sector for fresh thinking— by using our interwoven international networks to create long term business development where people and the environment matter. This is why we launched the Fashion Roundtable Election Manifesto last month. We put fashion and our diverse workforce, business needs, global working relationships and entrepreneurial aspirations front and centre of this manifesto for a better, cleaner and safer fashion industry.

I am really proud of the work we are doing: consistently thinking ahead, being strategic and making sustainable solutions the forefront of Fashion Roundtable’s series of surveys, events and policy work.

Before I started Fashion Roundtable there was no conversation about fashion and policy; it was not spoken about, as though it was unfit for polite conversation. My decision to launch after working inside the privileged parliamentary village and seeing the lack of creative sector voices and definitely those from fashion, cutting through, of course has disrupted the narrative and rightly so. We need to know our worth: whether that is the fashion assistant who isn’t being paid when working for a large organisation, or a factory worker being paid £3.50 in Leicester to make your sequin outfit for the Christmas party season, or even the fashion graduate who has built their contacts and wants to remain to build their business in the UK. I don’t know about you, but I want change. I am tired of seeing—what I call—20th Century outmoded narratives across our news, filling our minds with them. We have to aim for something more harmonious, which listens and respects all of us.

And this isn’t a UK-only perspective. Look around you, wherever you are do you see bias in what you read, on your Instagram feed, or in your community? If so, I believe it’s important to step out of your algorithm of cosy conversations and listen to those you might not agree with. Elections always highlight these dichotomies: from the UK political parties on the doorstep, to the news coming from Washington, what we see all too often is polarised mindsets.

Fashion Roundtable aim to strip away this with solutions: for the first time we brought XR together with fashion brands and businesses, we linked fashion styling creatives with union representation (more on this very soon) and we created an Election Manifesto for fashion, by fashion.

If you would like to know more about our work and how we might help you develop goals and solutions in 2020, please reach out (admin@fashionroundtable.co.uk) and we look forward to getting creative in the year ahead. As Winston Churchill famously said during WW2 when he was asked to cut arts funding: “Then what would we be fighting for?” Admittedly, many of us would not agree with Churchill’s stance at Gallipoli in WW1, or his lack of support for women to have the vote, but I think we can all agree with this. You might not agree with everything someone has to say; but there will be something and it’s from these common ground alignments we can create real and inclusive change.