Is Asos Forging Ahead As The Most Conscious High-Street Brand?

From the outside, it seems that Asos has two goals for 2018: to get inclusivity and sustainability at the forefront of its agenda. And again, from the outside, it seems to be hitting both of these targets. Of the former, it released a second collaboration with LGBTQ+ charity GLAAD, welcomed paralympian Chloe Ball-Hopkins into its design team for a special project and turned its cut-offs into sanitary pads for women in Africa. Of the latter, it pledged to ban the sale of mohair, silk, cashmere and feathers across its entire platform and launched a sustainable fashion training programme. Yes, these are all headline-grabbing promises, but it’s more than the majority of high-street brands are doing.

To enforce its commitment to ethical trading Asos will host a conference today, September 26, in London with its best-selling 90 brands. Levi's, Adidas, Nike and Puma will discuss worker rights, purchasing practices, transparency, circularity and raw materials with organisations such as Fashion Revolution, WGSN and the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre to establish industry-wide best practices.

“We believe the future of fashion is ever-changing, unpredictable but most of all incredibly exciting," Nick Beighton, Asos CEO, commented. “By working together, we believe we can deliver a systemic shift in the way our industry addresses key ethical trade and sustainability challenges and proactively design a future we all believe in.”

The event, entitled "The Future of Fashion: Transformation through Collaboration", follows the release of Asos’s second Modern Slavery Statement and its Modern Slavery event at the House of Lords, which identified and addressed human ethics concerns in the clothing sector. While 93 other brands also signed the 2020 Circular Fashion System Commitment, Asos is thinking outside the box in order to turn its pledges relating to the treatment of humans and animals into actions. It has a long way to go to become a conscious platform for 140-plus brands who all follow their own business commandments, but it's making waves that will hopefully influence other high-street giants too.