Dear University Secretary, Registrar's office and LCF Student Complaints Officer,

I am writing to draw your attention to a serious divergence from the University’s moral code in the BA (Hons) Cordwainers Footwear: Product Design and Innovation course which I hope you will be keen to redress.

The Second Year students recently received their first term brief. It asks that students research the design and production process of Inditex, who have been the focus of assignments in previous years:

“For the Second year’s industry led project we collaborated with Spanish company, Inditex, whose most well known brand is Zara. They researched the latest catwalk trends and used them as a starting point for designing a range of bags targeted at the brand’s fashion-savvy customers. We were lucky enough to be guided along the way with the Zara team who flew in from Spain for critiques and to judge the winner”

Inditex is an established, successful giant in the fashion. This can be explained in no small part by their ‘fast fashion’ business model which means that Zara is able to deliver ‘new products twice each week to its 1,670 stores around the world’ which ‘adds up to more than 10,000 new designs each year. It takes the company only 10 to 15 days to go from the design stage to the sales floor’ (Petro, 2012). But at what cost, and to whom?

The fast fashion model has been proven to have a devastating environmental and social impact. Clothing production takes up land, consumes vast amounts of energy and chemicals to create disposable products: last year, the world bought 73mln tons of textiles, around 350 000 tons of used clothes go to landfill in the UK every year . Workers in China face 150% of overtime each month and 90% don’t have access to social insurance. Working conditions in these factories often do not meet regulations and fatal injury is frequent. In addition, their tireless work affords them wages that stack up as obscenely low when compared to the profit made by selling these products.

Inditex are certainly not the only major organization whose practices are morally dubious: indeed all the practices and effects of this model are symptomatic of the wider problem of globalization. However, the University’s partnership with this particular company and the course brief it sets in response to their work is at odds with the claim that the course uses a ‘forward-thinking business and management portfolio and relationship with the global fashion and lifestyle industries’ to drive a ‘mission to “Fashion the Future”’. Exploiting poverty in developing countries to increase profit and covetous use of finite materials to increas productivity is not ‘forward thinking’, nor does it ‘challenge social, political and ethical agendas’ in the fashion industry.

Companies like Inditex are only able to operate with these principles because we, the consumers allow them to. I believe the University should stand by its claims and instill a moral, conscious ethic in its students. The bigger picture should inform much more closely what kinds of organizations would bring mutually beneficial partnerships.

For me to undertake this assignment would mean breaching my own moral code. I do not wish to be associated with or in any way serve the interest of Inditex: I don’t want it on my conscience. I therefore demand an alternative assignment through which I will be able to meet the same learning objectives and count it towards the completion of my degree.

I thank the University for their understanding with this matter and hope very much that the points I have made will be cosely examined and appropriate action taken to meet the standards described in the course literature and required of them by the wider world.

Yours faithfully,

Aniela Fidler Wieruszewska

BA (Hons) Cordwainers Footwear: Product Design and Innovation (2nd year)