Look at what you’re wearing. Who made your clothes?
It’s not a straightforward question.
Hundreds of workers and businesses around the world are involved in making the clothes we wear, from the farm to the factory. “The fashion supply chain is incredibly long,” says Melinda Tually, the co-ordinator for , an advocacy group for ethical fashion.
Each year, Fashion Revolution Week coincides with the anniversary on April 24 of the Rana Plaza disaster. In 2013, 1134 people died when the five-story building in Dhaka, Bangladesh collapsed. The upper four floors of the building, which housed several garment factories employing as many as 5000 workers, were built without a permit.
Many of the victims were female factory workers and their children who produced clothes for high street brands like Benetton, Mango and Primark. When cracks had appeared in the building’s exterior the day before the collapse, a quick assessment deemed the structure safe and managers ordered their employees back to work.
(We want to) remind people there are human faces behind everything we wear, and everything we consume. It’s the same message for any industry.
The tragedy highlighted the inequities of the global fashion industry, where cheap labour is used to mass produce ‘fast fashion’.
Tually says it's a broken system with forced and child labour and unsafe working conditions prevalent throughout the supply chain.
“We don’t think about who makes our clothes anymore. We don’t associate what we wear with someone’s livelihood,” Tually said.
“People aren’t earning living wages, which would allow them dignity to be able to afford the basics in life as well as have some disposable income,” she says.
Pollution, waste and excessive water use take a huge environmental toll too with the lack of visibility in the supply chain creating conditions that lead to disasters like Rana Plaza.
“When you don’t have visibility of your supply chain…you can’t monitor it. You can’t manage what you can’t measure,” Ms Tually said.
Through its advocacy, Ms Tually said the Fashion Revolution hopes to reconnect those broken links in the supply chain.
“(We want to) remind people there are human faces behind everything we wear, and everything we consume. It’s the same message for any industry.”
One of these initiatives is the #whomademyclothes campaign where social media users are encouraged to display pictures of themselves wearing their clothes inside out, displaying the label.
“We don’t think about who makes our clothes anymore. We don’t associate what we wear with someone’s livelihood,” Tually said.
The idea, Tually says, is to encourage customers to ask brands who made their clothes and where.
“It’s really a tool to create a conversation,” she said.
Last year, Fashion Revolution Week hashtags including #whomademyclothes had 533 million impressions, up from 156 million in 2016.
Over 1000 mainstream brands responded to #whomademyclothes queries from customers. Thousands of producers, from cotton workers in India to garment factory workers in China, shared posts featuring the #imadeyourclothes hashtag.
“It’s an amazing way for producers and makers to show their faces, which is what the movement is all about,” Tually said.
And the industry is changing. Over 150 brands now publish the first tier of their factory lists, “a huge increase since we started five years ago.”
This type of transparency “doesn’t mean that we’re not going to see child labour or we’re not going to see unsafe conditions, but it opens the door to accountability.”
Brands are tracing their supply chain and implementing ethical sourcing programs for the first time thanks to increased awareness generated by Fashion Revolution campaigns.
“It’s testament to the positivity of our movement - we’re not a name and shame movement, we don’t lobby brands, we don’t advocate boycotting. We’re a realistic movement, we’ll call out the issues, but we celebrate progress,” Ms Tually said.
“It’s essential to celebrate the wins as we go along because we want to encourage the industry to get better, to be more transparent, and you can only do that by celebrating those that do and hope they’ll influence others even further.”
One brand that has made significant progress is the Cotton On Group. In 2013, the Cotton On brands scored a B- in Baptist Aid’s Ethical Fashion Report. In , the company scored an A, making it one of the report’s best performers.
It’s essential to celebrate the wins as we go along because we want to encourage the industry to get better, to be more transparent, and you can only do that by celebrating those that do and hope they’ll influence others even further.
Among Cotton On Group’s achievements is an Ethical Sourcing Program that includes requiring its suppliers to sign on to fair working conditions, transparent business relationships and responsible environmental practices.
It publishes a , joined the , a global network that promotes responsible use of freshwater in industry, and signed up to the . The company has sourced 700 tonnes of cotton from Kenya Cotton, a sustainable cotton program it launched in Kwale County, Kenya in 2014.
The ultimate challenge for fashion retailers lies in tracing the supply chain from factory to farm. The found that just five per cent of companies knew who all their suppliers were, from the tier one factories to second tier input suppliers to the producers of raw materials that make up tier three.
“We know that there are horrific labour rights abuses in the lowest tier of the fashion industry,” says Tually. In Uzbekistan, for example, forced child labour is common in the cotton industry.
“It’s essential to trace it all the way back but you have to start where your closest relationships are, and the brands’ closest relationships are with tier one, the garment factories,” says Tually. “It’s an industry that has been set up to be opaque.”
She acknowledges that while it might be possible to identify the country or region raw materials come from, pinning it down to single producers is often possible. Still, a fully traceable supply chain is Fashion Revolution’s ultimate goal. “We want every worker in the supply chain to be visible.”
