MAIN PHOTOGRAPH: Safia Minney with People Tree catalogues. TOP: KTS scarf and top. Pink hand-spun scarf by the indigenous people in the Peruvian Sierra, £28; with matching lose-knit sleeveless gilet £35. ABOVE LEFT: From the first People Tree fashion show in the UK. ABOVE RIGHT: 'Little Red Dog' volunteer model, in organic cotton undies and T-shirt.

ASHION often deserves the bad rap it gets from critics. At its worst, it reflects the consumerism of the 1950s' American automakers: incremental but hard-sold changes that mean little except to a few people within the industry. It attracts the attention of news media wanting a story on sweatshop manufacture (and in the recently dismissed case of Nike v. Kasky, they got one).
   A few have begun turning this around. It may be particularly fashionable today to become ecologically conscious and to do something for public policy as brands try to find new ways of creating consumer attention. But conscience was what motivated Safia Minney, the founder of Global Village and its People Tree fashion brand, to begin one of the world's first Fair Trade fashion labels.
   The daughter of an Indian Mauritian father and a Swiss mother, Minney realized that fair trade changed communities. Seeing the difficulties in rural communities in third-world countries, she knew those in the first and second worlds were privileged--and in a position to help. 'It's very difficult when you've got a baby on your breast to turn down a beggar woman with a baby on her breast. My father … came from a corrugated iron-roof house that is synonymous with the poor or economically disadvantaged in so many third-world countries. It's just the luck of the draw.'
   That luck has since turned People Tree into a label sold in two countries and Minney conducted her interview with Lucire from both her native Britain and Japan. When she first arrived in Japan in 1990, she could not find organic food or even recycle. 'There didn't even seem to be "alternative" publications covering environmental and social justice issues,' she said.

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‘My father … came from a corrugated iron-roof house that is synonymous with the poor or economically disadvantaged in third-world countries. [Where you’re born is] just the luck of the draw'