We are at a point in the fashion calendar where greenwashing starts to peak. My inbox is groaning with endless pitches promising innovation and thrills from so-called sustainable brands. Celebrate Earth Day with a T-shirt that will likely end up in landfill? No, thank you.
Today is also the start of Fashion Revolution week, which is marking its ten year anniversary. Its inception came a year after the horrific Rana Plaza disaster in Dhakar, Bangladesh, the notorious factory collapse in which 1,138 garment workers - the majority women - were killed, and over 2,500 injured. Clothes for brands including Zara, H&M and Primark were made in the overloaded factory building which was attempting to function without any consideration for the workers who were there, paid a pittance, with no wage security.
It was a pitiful 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 of course are not new issues or 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 were compelled to activism and to start asking what might well seem like a simple question, ‘who made my clothes?’. A decade on, while more questions are being asked the answers remain opaque.
The movement is fashion’s biggest force of community advocacy, and has representation globally across 80 countries. Its biggest contribution has been the Fashion Transparency Index which is a thorough piece of work ranking 250 of the world’s biggest fashion companies - high street and luxury, from Burberry to Tesco - on their public disclosure of human right and environmental policies and their impact across operations and supply chains.
It does however make for frustrating reading, most brands simply don’t publish this information; only 12% 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 viewed from space) this is a critical area.What I always find baffling is that while on the one hand there is seemingly more awareness about the impact of our rampant thirst for more stuff, the more knowledge we have the more it seems to accelerate in the wrong direction. The rise of ultra fast fashion in the last ten years has poured oil onto the fire of overproduction and overconsumption.
Shein — which has endless accusations of alleged malpractice when it comes to production — doubled its profit to $2billion last year
Shein - which has endless accusations of alleged malpractice when it comes to production - doubled its profit to $2billion 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. Which indicates she’s shopping for trends, disposing and churning over and over again. The fashion cycle has been supercharged by our addiction to constantly refreshed content, everytime we pick up our phones and start to scroll we want to see something new - whether that’s a celebrity picture or new clothes.
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 current acting Managing Director says that “The issues are systemic. I would like to be optimistic, but 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 can change our habits. We don’t have to help fuel the fire. This Saturday, across the world, people will take part in the initiative’s Mend In Public Day to encourage us to reuse and repair our existing clothes. At the One New Change shopping centre near St Pauls you’ll find specialists offering free upcycling lessons, customisation, patching and darning. It might be a small start, but it’s something. You don't, after all, really need a new T-shirt.
