FASHION REVOLUTION | FASHION TRANSPARENCY INDEX BRAZIL | 2018
07
WHY GREATER TRANSPARENCY IS IMPORTANT IN THE FASHION INDUSTRY? When the Rana Plaza building collapsed five years ago in Bangladesh, killing and injuring thousands of garment workers, people had to dig through the rubble looking for clothing labels in order to figure out which brands were linked to the five garment factories in the building.
Fragmented supply chains obscure accountability
In some cases, it took weeks for brands and retailers to determine why their labels were found amongst the rubble and what sort of purchasing agreements they had with those suppliers. Many clothing brands sourcing from the factories inside Rana Plaza didn’t know their products were being made there.
Brands and retailers may work with hundreds or even thousands of factories at any given time - and that is just the suppliers that cut, sew and assemble their garments. There are many facilities further down the chain that weave, dye and finish materials and farms that grow fibres used in their clothing. During the manufacturing process our clothes are touched by many pairs of hands before they ever reach the shop floor or, increasingly, online shopping sites.
The vast majority of today’s fashion brands and retailers do not own their manufacturing facilities, making it difficult to monitor or control working conditions across the highly globalised supply chain. This can sometimes be used as an excuse for brands to evade responsibility for how their products are made.
[Top] "Dhaka Savar Building Collapse" by Rijans via Flickr CC [Bottom] "Site of the Rana Plaza factory collapse" by Dorothee Baumann-Pauly