Birdsong: No Sweatshops, No Photoshop
In a nutshell
What do they sell? Fashion sourced exclusively from women's organisations & charities.
Why are they so great? It’s all about making fashion fairer for women, both makers and wearers alike.
No sweatshops, no Photoshop, just fun & fair fashion that supports women around the world.
The full story
Who is Birdsong?
When I told people about Dress to Protest, more than one sent me straight to Birdsong, and I can see why. Birdsong is a young online fashion brand who curate collections and pieces from skilled women's organisations & charities. Birdsong began when three women with creative backgrounds wanted a way to support women’s groups after big funding cuts. Now, they bring us fair fashion that is full of soul.
You’ll find iconic fried-egg or avocado t-shirts, luxury lingerie, durable totes, vintage jeans and artisan jewellery among many other covetable items over at Birdsong. They’re 100% against using Photoshop and their marketing content stands out from the conventional fast fashion aesthetic for all the right reasons. The main model in their latest jewellery campaign for pieces made by survivors of slavery was a beautiful cat – but don’t worry, other collections feature the type of women you’d want to take out for coffee.
Why is what they do important?
Birdsong are using fashion & their customers’ buying power to support women – they’ve managed to give £20,000 back so far and they only set up in 2014. They seek out women’s organisations who have great skills and bring them to us. 85-90% of people who work in sweatshops are women: right now, fashion definitely does not work for them. Birdsong are trying to turn this around so that the women who buy fashion don’t have to compromise their values in doing so.
But they also want to change how fashion treats its customers. I'm sure I’ll be excused by feminist friends for generalising and saying that more often than not, us ladies do quite a bit of shopping, and we like it a lot. But the models we see and the cuts and sizes we wish we could buy don’t do a great job at making us feel good about how we look. They’re simply unrealistic, and tend to make us think we care about stuff that deep down we know isn't what makes us happy. At Birdsong, Photoshop is a big no. Armpit hair and tummy rolls? The more the merrier. Birdsong is using its platform to bring more and more diversity into the realm of fashion, allowing us to define beauty on our rules, not by what we are force-fed by people who don’t care that much about us as individuals.
Where can I find Birdsong?
Have a gander at their lovely stock over at their website, where you can also read about their ethos from the horse’s mouth. Getting them onto your Instagram feed isn’t a bad shout, either.
