Does Buying Ethical Fashion Actually Empower Women?

Yes — when it's built the way Saheli Women built it. A collective founded by one woman with the equivalent of about $100 has grown into a fair-wage atelier employing over 200 women across rural Rajasthan, and the ripple effects go far past a paycheck. That's the real test of "ethical fashion": not whether the label says organic cotton, but whether the woman who made the piece actually has more power in her life because of it.

Who is Madhu Vaishnav, and what is Saheli Women?

Madhu Vaishnav was married at 23 and told she couldn't work outside the home. She taught herself English, became a teacher, and eventually spent five years with an American NGO — and along the way she kept noticing women in her village of Bhikamkor who wanted paid work and had nowhere to bring their skills. In 2014 she started Saheli Women ("saheli" means girlfriend in Hindi) with a tiny budget and a seventy-year-old building, teaching traditional and modern embroidery to women who set their own hours and holidays.

A decade later, Saheli has grown into an independent slow-fashion brand working with more than 60 partners worldwide, including the Amsterdam label Zazi Vintage, which just wrapped a canal-side pop-up of Saheli's third in-house collection. "In any business relationship there should be mutual benefit, and there should be love in it too," Vaishnav told FashionUnited this summer — a line that reads less like a founder's mission statement and more like a boundary she fought to draw. Two years ago she moved Saheli from anonymous supplier to named brand specifically because she was tired of watching other labels take credit for her women's embroidery.

The effects showed up at home before they showed up on a runway. During the pandemic, when the women became their households' main earners, something quieter shifted too: husbands started making chai, and women started having more say over family planning. That's what Reformation's IPO and Sézane's slower growth are also, in their own Western-market way, arguing for — that a fashion business can measure success by more than how fast it ships.

Why this matters if you've ever wondered where your clothes came from

Most of the 430 million people who make the world's clothing are women, and a huge share of them work in conditions Saheli was built to reject — no say over hours, no ownership of the craft, wages that don't stretch to cover a family. That's the same gap France's crackdown on ultra-fast fashion platforms is trying to legislate from the other direction: squeeze the $5 dress hard enough and eventually someone has to answer for who got squeezed to make it that cheap.

You don't need a closet full of Saheli pieces to feel this. You need to notice, once, whose hands actually made the thing you're about to buy — and whether that maker had any power in the transaction at all. That single question is the whole difference between fast fashion and the model Vaishnav built. It's also why Saheli's daughters are part of the story: the parent organization behind the collective pays for members' daughters to stay in school, so the empowerment doesn't stop with one generation of women stitching for the next one leaving.

One thing to try today

Next time you're about to buy something new, look up who made it — not the brand, the maker. Most ethical labels name their ateliers or collectives right on the product page. If a brand can't tell you, that's information too.

Quote to sit with

"I believe that the threads of fashion can link us as a global sisterhood in the world." — Madhu Vaishnav

💌 Sarah