Fashion has inspired direct political action at least since the French Revolution, when noblemen abandoned their pink stockings and high heels to avoid the guillotine. Since widespread industrialization, prominent protests have focused more on modes and means of production than the material products themselves. In recent decades, consumer boycotts, workers’ rights campaigns, and organized buycotts have characterized the often highly publicized opposition to aspects of the clothing industry. As a result, brands and products labeled “ethical” according to a variety of environmental and human rights measures emerged. In The Fight for Ethical Fashion, Philip Balsiger examines the strategies and negotiations involved in creating one contemporary multinational consumer campaign, the Europe-wide Clean Clothes Campaign (CCC).
As outsourcing practices and rapid communication enabled the mass globalization of clothing production, protests of that process similarly adapted, connecting across borders. In an instructive contribution to social movement studies, Balsiger traces the involvement of two countries, France and Switzerland, in the CCC. Relying heavily on qualitative fieldwork and an array of empirical sources, the author starts at the campaign’s roots in the changing political influences over the field of development aid and the development of consumer campaigns in the 1970s. As the campaign professionalized, the importance of planned interactions and strategic negotiations between the campaigners and their main targets grew. Despite embracing symmetrical goals of convincing major brands, corporations, and retailers to adopt and monitor codes of conduct, Switzerland and France saw contrasting reactions and disparate market outcomes. Through this comparative lens, the book shows how a single campaign elicits divergent reactions from participants—and how the varieties of capitalism and political connections influence the results of social movement pressure on corporations (7).
Studying the CCC provides a focus on a specific category of protest, one that did not center on legal change but crafted actions centered on the relations between consumers and national brands and retailers, such as Nike, Carrefour, or Migros in Switzerland (4). Moreover, CCC was a planned campaign, proactive and mostly professionally organized, characterized by restraint and orchestrated actions. In the first few chapters, Balsiger describes the changes in development aid and consumer protests throughout the 1960s and 1970s, juggling genealogical descriptions for both France and Switzerland, and threading together the meanings and results of the very different political contexts and corporate or institutional influences. Chapter 2, “The Rise of Consumer Campaigns,” describes the roles that diverse factions, from protesting students to religious youth groups, played in consumer activism.
The campaign that evolves is a conversation, or more exactly, a negotiation, not only among the activists in Switzerland and France, but also between campaigners and their corporate targets, wherein strategic moves were made and adapted from several identifiable directions. As Balsiger readily admits, his case study does not give equal attention to the strategic interactions on the part of both campaign makers and their targets, and so “constitutes a step” in the “strategic interactions approach” to movement studies (19). Considering the concentration on the campaigners themselves, the book is disappointingly lacking in individual accounts, which no doubt obscures significant contributions or ideas of the distinct people involved. While Balsiger does briefly highlight the important role of women in the rise of consumer campaigns in the 1970s, the narrative lacks a more in-depth exploration of the specific social contexts inspiring these women, as well as more mention of the long transnational history of women-driven consumer actions (e.g., the White Label campaign in Progressive Era United States). The acknowledgment of gender dynamics in the construction of social movements falls away quickly, and the reader is left wondering whether women remain instrumental in the CCC’s functions.
Balsiger’s greatest success is in the ground-level accounts of the near-constant process of compromise involved in the CCC. Clearly, negotiations between the campaigners and the major brands, corporations, and retailers targeted tend to reframe the issues. Compromise described nearly every aspect of the campaign’s inner workings as well. The comparative analysis of France and Switzerland illustrates how varying political precedents within nation-states required compromise for the planned campaign to remain internally consistent. Also, because mobilization of the public was a key priority in the formation and growth of the CCC, practical expectations were often balanced by emotional public reactions to aspects of the cause. For example, Chapter 5, “Campaign Styles and Protests in the Marketplace,” discusses child labor, an issue that needed a careful practical approach, as simply banning the practices guaranteed dire results—prostitution or other illegal pursuits—in some contexts. However, the emotional response that images and statistics of child labor elicited from the public made the topic a dramatic attention-getter. In this way, the official campaign was sometimes forced to go against the requests of local organizers and public audiences (105). Balsiger devotes most of the book’s attention to the formation and strategies of the CCC, but Chapter 7, “Strategic Interactions and Campaign Outcomes,” does discuss the specific outcomes of campaign efforts. Collaboration with targeted companies was far more successful in Switzerland, and both countries saw their best results early in the campaign’s launch. While Balsiger assesses some of the campaign’s major successes, a truly satisfactory explanation of the campaign’s diminishing returns remains on the table for future scholars.
All told, Balsiger’s book is a vital contribution to social movement studies. The author brings together three usually disparate perspectives on movements through looking at protests’ effect on markets, including a focus on the political process on collective action, an understanding of the ways in which movements use institutionalized means to exact change, and the focus new social movements concentrate on everyday lives by challenging acceptable behaviors. The Fight for Ethical Fashion should be required reading for historians and activists seeking a deeper understanding of both consumer campaigns and ethically produced clothing.
