The clothing business, worth $500 billion worldwide, represents 10 percent of all world trade with developing countries, says Priya Patel, creator of Fashion for Development, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that sees fashion as a tool for development around the globe. This makes clothing one of the largest trade items being imported from the developing world. This sector also employs more than 30 million people, most from the developing world. One in six of these workers are underage, poorly paid, and forced to work in hazardous conditions. Organic or fair-trade fashion is arising from the universally condemnation of child labor and below living wage sweat shop conditions of workers by multinationals such as NIKE, GAP, WALMART…etc. in the 1980s and continual problems in the 21st century.

However, Americans only spent $50 million on nonfood organic items in 2005 (source: the Organic Trade Association), and nearly $180 million in fair trade sales in 2002 (source: IFAT, a global network of fair trade organizations). Sales of organic and fair trade products make up only a tiny percentage of overall sales, but we can continue to demand more organic and ethically made products.

The first products to carry the fair trade certification were coffee and chocolate, which were chosen due to their significance in colonial history and global trade. Next came sugar, rice, and other agricultural products. However, fair trade clothing has been slow to emerge on the scene, and still has not gained anywhere near the kind of prominence that fair trade coffee has in the United States. The textile industry is one of the world's biggest offenders when it comes to protecting worker rights, providing adequate pay, or adhering to basic environmental and safety standards, and so fair trade clothing is a notion that is in desperate need of greater exposure.

One of the first fair trade clothing lines was offered by People Tree, which grew from Global Village, an environmental campaigning NGO was founded in Japan by Safia Minney in 1991.

One of the more famous attempts at fair trade clothing in recent years was the clothing line "EDUN", a fair trade clothing line started by Ali Hewson, wife of musician and activist Bono, and designer Rogan Gregory, available at NORDSTROM. Working under the "trade not aid" philosophy popularized in the 1960s, EDUN works with several countries, mostly in Africa, to produce a clothing line that is said to adhere to "fair trade principles." The clothing line was highly criticized in the media, which could in part be due to the high profile nature of Bono, and also the fact that EDUN for whatever reason did not choose to work with a certifying body such as Fairtrade, which might lend more legitimacy to the clothing line. EDUN also claims to use organic materials in much of its clothing, which points to another hot trend in the business: eco-fashion.

Helped by technological advances, garments are being produced from hemp, soy, bamboo, corn fiber, wood pulp, seaweed, recycled soda cans, and blends of these materials. In addition to creating environmentally friendly clothing, many of these materials can be obtained locally and without using chemicals that damage the environment or workers.

Fashion magazines such as Glamour and Elle have devoted substantial portions of specific issues to organic clothing, which suggests the trend is moving from the fringes of the clothing design world to the mainstream.