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Paul.
Like most teenage daughters, my sixteen-year-old loves shopping.
I do not.
Taking her to the mall, therefore, feels like an endless procession through shops selling clothes that, to my apparently ageing eyes, all look the same. We wander into one shop, inspect various tops, leave without buying anything, repeat the process several times, and eventually circle back to the first shop where she buys the thing she could have bought an hour earlier. I am sure there is some sophisticated shopping logic involved that I simply haven’t discovered yet.
It doesn’t stop when we get home. Every week, or so it seems, another parcel arrives containing clothes or something else she has ordered online, usually after travelling from a distant part of the world. She has recently discovered the joys of a little financial independence, and there is something lovely about watching her decide how to spend her own money.
Yet one part of it bothers me.
Some companies selling extremely inexpensive clothing have uncomfortable questions hanging over the way their goods are produced, particularly the wages and conditions of the people making them. I have raised this with my daughter more than once, and her response is normally a shrug followed by an argument that is actually difficult to dismiss: “I couldn’t afford it otherwise.” I guess she has a point, although there are only so many tops a girl should need.
That conversation came back to me this week when I read about the UK Ethical Fashion Guide 2026, which assesses 99 companies covering 336 clothing brands on workers’ rights and environmental practices. The wider research behind the guide produced one particularly troubling finding: 87% of companies assessed could not demonstrate that a living wage was being paid to any worker in their supply chain.
It made me wonder what Christianity actually has to say about all of this.
