The Indian branch of Fairtrade is promoting sustainable fashion through initiatives and campaigns. The campaign ‘Show Your Label 2019’ encourages people to wear their clothing inside-out to show its label and see if it bears the Fairtrade mark. The initiative is intended to make people feel proud of wearing sustainable fashion. The campaign ran across Bangalore, Mumbai, Kolkata, and Goa with a number of interactive events in schools. Students promoted the Show Your Label campaign and wore 100 per cent sustainable Fairtrade school uniform T-shirts. Going forward, Fairtrade will deepen engagement to minimise exploitation and maximise positive impact across the entire life-cycle of fashion products.

Fairtrade, for instance, aims at reducing the social and environmental costs of cotton production. On a social level, genetic modification of cotton seeds has wreaked havoc in traditionally agrarian communities. In India, the second biggest cotton producer in the world after China, there has been a surge in farmer suicides. These tragic deaths are linked to genetically modified cotton and the ugly cycle of dependence on special seeds and chemicals into which many farmers fall. Cotton accounts for 24 per cent of global sales of agricultural insecticides and uses a huge amount of water.