WE are at a point in the fashion calendar
where greenwashing starts to peak. Celebrate Earth Day with a T-shirt that will likely end up in landfill? I’m fine, thanks.
Today is also the start of Fashion Revolution week, which is marking its 10-year anniversary. Its inception came a year after the horrific factory collapse at Rana Plaza in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in which 1,138 garment workers — the majority women — were killed and more than 2,500 injured. Clothes for brands including Zara, H&M and Primark were made in the overloaded factory building.
It was a reckoning for the impact of the globalised fashion production trade, where the mass manufacture of our clothing has been widely outsourced to countries in the global south, who toil in poverty to satiate our desire for an endless churn of new-in pieces to shop. These are not new revelations. When I was growing up in the Eighties and Nineties we knew about sweatshops. In the wake of the tragedy, Fashion Revolution founders Orsolo de Castro and Carry Somers asked an apparently simple question: “Who made my clothes?” A decade on the answers remain opaque.
The movement’s biggest contribution is the Fashion Transparency Index which ranks 250 of the world’s biggest fashion companies — high street and luxury — on their public disclosure of human rights and environmental policies.
It makes for frustrating reading. Most brands simply don’t publish this information; only 12 per cent of brands surveyed for example disclose their production volumes. In the wake of the piles of discarded clothes filling up beaches in Ghana and the Chilean desert (which can be seen from space) this is a critical area.
What I always find baffling is that while there’s more awareness about the impact of our rampant thirst for more stuff, it seems to be accelerating in the wrong direction. The rise of ultra-fast fashion in the past 10 years has poured oil onto the fires of overproduction and overconsumption.
Shein — which has endless accusations of alleged malpractice when it comes to production — doubled its profit to $2 billion last year. The Chinese giant might position itself at the Gen Z heartlands, but in reality its average customer is a 35-year-old woman who spends $100 a month.
Rana Plaza forced the International Accord regulation in Bangladesh in relation to factory safety, but in other production centres, workers are still producing in dangerous environments. Rudo Nondo, Fashion Revolution’s acting managing director, says: “The honest truth is that we cannot say whether or not a tragedy like this would occur again.”
As consumers there is some onus on us. We don’t have to help fuel the fire. This Saturday, across the world and in London, people will take part in the initiative’s Mend In Public Day to encourage us to repair our existing clothes. It might be a small start, but it’s something. You don’t, after all, really need a new T-shirt.