Ethics of Fashion

[John 6IX Breezy]

Initially when I thought of ethical issues around fashion, I thought of things like Zara and H&M. These are rightly criticized for being wasteful. (Though whether they're worse than others or not I don't know.) On this topic, I think good old Marxian critiques are probably the starting point. Allocation of resources, class exploitation -- all the classics. I can see the arguments for not buying new stuff every single season. 

Yes, so Zara and H&M are what I had in mind initially. I can understand if they have unethical practices, but I'm struggling to understand or conceptualize the transfer of ethics from the merchant to the consumer when a purchase is made.

For example, imagine there are two boxes in front of you. You pay $20 and get to keep the contents of the mystery box of your choice—one of them has Zara shirts and the other has thrifted shirts. You pick a box at random and it happens to be the Zara one. Have you made an unethical choice? Has it hurt the environment?

I'm not sure if the analogy does what I want it to do. I'm trying to emphasize the boundary that exists between the consumer and the merchant by turning it into a blind purchase. The assumption being that if the purchase is truly unethical, your awareness of it shouldn't be what determines that.