Eco-clothing isn’t just for granola eating hippies anymore. With new eco-friendly dyes, manufacturing accountability and a diverse choice of organic fibers like cottagora, eco-fleece, hemp, organic cotton, organic linen, silk, tencel and wool, eco-fashion is at its height in the fashion world.

Bono, Diane von Furstenburg, Oscar de la Renta and various others have been taken captive by eco-fashion. The long history of eco-clothing and fair trade labor practices span over a decade of activism and events, all paving the rocky road to the forefront of consumer purchasing today.

The notion of fair trade was introduced because of unfair labor practices and the exploitation of workers. Fair trade ultimately aims to achieve unionization of workers. Its major historical events, which also helped the organic campaign, date back to the 1960s when environmental goods were first introduced to the consumer market, which opened the pathway for socially conscious purchasing of goods.

In the 1990s, students across the United States began to question where their campus logo licensed apparel was created. With that question, in August 1996 President Clinton and Vice President Gore met with leaders from the footwear and apparel industries, labor, nongovernmental organizations—including 17 U.S. universities—and consumer groups to discuss sweatshops, consumer concerns and their need to join together to address these issues. In April of 1997, the Apparel Industry Partnership (AIP), as they became known, finalized a code of conduct that was to be used. In November 1998, AIP chose the Fair Labor Association as the monitoring agency to implement this code of conduct, which was used toward university concerns as well as many others. Designers like Kathie Lee Gifford, Nike, Sean John, and the NFL and NBA apparel industries were caught using sweatshop labor and subjected to media scrutiny.

Now almost all major CSUs and UCs belong to either the FLA or the Workers Rights Consortium (WRC), both of which are working to monitor manufacturing. The FLA for instance, monitors manufacturing through a dozen accredited groups that follow a standard workplace code of conduct. The code of conduct details the strict no child labor, harassment or abuse, and nondiscrimination laws, minimum health and safety requirements, freedom of association and collective bargaining rights, minimum wages and benefits, hours of work laws and mandatory overtime compensation. Once evaluations of brand-name companies and their ethical conducts have been assessed all results are then reported to the public to ensure transparency, accountability and change.

Of equal importance were the 1999 World Trade Organization riots in Seattle that woke consumers up to the global purchasing relationship between manufacturing and the consumption of products.

Also in 1999, Starbucks introduced its fair trade organic coffee in response to threats from activists to boycott their products. This mainstream company’s decision made it easier for the public to accept fair trade goods like chocolate, coffee and bananas. Starbucks helped open the door for organic and fair trade food, fueling the organic fair trade campaign. With those types of products came a standard third-party certification system that enabled better monitoring and reprimanding, which isn’t in place on the fair trade clothing side yet.

Organic cotton farming allows the bug-eat-bug world to reign supreme. This “natural enemy complex” keeps all types of predators, insects, parasites and pests in check rather than using heavy dosages of chemical herbicides, insecticides and defoliants—usually called pesticides—to ward off insects and facilitate harvest. To break each farming practice down to simplistic ideals, traditional farming is done in the name of economy and efficiency with a continual pressure to produce more for less money. Organic farming on the other hand, practices “eyes to the acre,” or walking the fields to catch potential problems early, sometimes using hand labor instead of chemical solutions. The goal is to achieve a balance of good bugs and bad bugs. But when pesticides are applied all bugs are wiped out, causing an unbalance. This is why cotton crops are sprayed repeatedly throughout the growing season.

In San Francisco there are dozens of organic fair trade retailers embracing eco-fashion’s ideals in their clothing and home accessories. Stores like the San Francisco-based online retailer Green Home (greenhome.com), Sahara Organics (saharaorganics.com) and A Happy Planet (ahappyplanet.com) in the Union Square area, and Swirlspace (swirlspace.com) in the Mission district.

Recently, American Apparel and Edun, the clothing line from Bono, have been getting media attention because of their winning combination of fair trade and use of organic cotton and other natural fibers. Bono has lived up to his career in environmentalism and global activism creating a watchdog system of his own in his factories, similar to that of the FLA.

While American Apparel claims to engage in fair trade—under fair trade’s ultimate goal of unionization—it doesn’t meet that requirement. Many critics think American Apparel confuses the issue of fair trade because it’s more of a patriotic “Made-in-America” brand than one that cleanses the economic relationship for the conscious consumer.

“We can buy a cheap, sweatshop-produced T-shirt from the mega chain store that puts our locally-owned retailers out of business and sends our money to a large corporation to continue their destructive practices,” Joanna Schultz, Hemp Industries Association PR director says. “Or we can buy an organic cotton or hemp T-shirt, manufactured sweatshop-free, from a locally-owned shop—recirculating money back into our own communities and supporting small farmers and manufacturers from farm to store.”

TransFair USA in Oakland is one of 19 members of the Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International (FLO), and the only third-party certifier of Fair Trade products in the United States. TransFair USA was the first to bring fair trade certification to the US in 1999.

Organizations like Symmetric Information in San Francisco are working to open a discussion and research a global living wage reference for workers around the world, focusing on determining an hourly wage rather than a fixed price per product. With input from different methodologies and data sets, Symmetric Information will help inform policy decisions by social auditors, labor unions and governments.

“In this nascent industry some of the problems being overcome are the lack of consensus on fair trade practices, truly independent monitoring organizations and the ultimate branding of these certifications,” says Richard Kahle, president of Symmetric Information.

The Sustainable Cotton Project in Davis, Calif., has been building the bridge between farmers, manufacturers and consumers since 1994, to better educate on why organic cotton is better and how we can transition to it. While many farmers have been skeptical of organic farming practices, the statistics against the pesticides used to grow traditional cotton are driving consumers to the organic variety.

Simple Life (simplelife.com), an online presentation from The Sustainable Cotton Project, strives to educate retailers and consumers about organic cotton and the threats and killers involved in traditional cotton farming practices. For instance, it takes 17 teaspoons of synthetic fertilizers to raise nine ounces of cotton, equal to one T-shirt.

Organic cotton is one way for the purchasing public to do its part, along with holding companies accountable for their labor practices. Through these ideals a new breed of buyer is being created—the thoughtful conscientious consumer who cares more about the story of their products than the sale. With facts like these, consumers are realizing how the production chain, from conception to sale, affects everything around us.