‘Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.’
—Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris
‘Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than to merely keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us.’
—Virginia Wolf, Orlando
‘For anyone labouring under the misapprehension that their individual decisions are too small to have any influence over the status quo, I want to set you straight.’
—Lucy Siegle, To Die For: Is fashion wearing out the world?
A few days after the Rana Plaza garment factory complex collapsed in 2013 in the Dhaka suburb of Savar, Bangladesh, Carry Somers was at home in London taking a bath. Ordinarily this, one of her favourite rituals, involved a relaxing soak while listening to The Archers. But now she was alone with her thoughts: What the hell was fashion going to do about cleaning up its act?
As riots broke out in Dhaka’s garment district, the news swelled uncomfortably with stories of unethical practices and responsibility-shirking. Bangladesh’s Prime Minister ordered the arrest of the Rana Plaza owners, but their famous clothing company clients seemed to be getting off lightly. Primark, Joe Fresh (stocked by J.C. Penney) and Benetton labels had been found in the wreckage. Benetton was denying doing business there, although it later emerged they had sourced 266,000 shirts from Rana Plaza makers in the six months prior.1 That ‘campaigners had to physically search through the rubble for clothing labels to prove which brands were producing in there’ showed how complex and opaque fashion’s supply chains were, said Somers.2
The death toll rose daily. On 26 April, it was at least 187. On 30 April, it reached 380. By 9 May it had passed a thousand. ‘Each time we moved a slab of concrete, we found a stack of bodies,’ Brigadier-General Siddiqul Alam, the man at the helm of the recovery operation, told the BBC.3
Bangladesh’s High Commissioner to London had just been on the telly, explaining that about 10 per cent of his country’s exports ended up in the UK. Buyers, he said, ‘go round these manufacturers and they negotiate every cent of it … they place their order with those who give them the most economy in terms of cents.’4 He called it ‘a pity’; what he meant was shame. ‘If you are cutting a cent here, you cut a cent across the entire production chain.’ He suggested, ‘[the] middle class here might have to pay a bit more’ for their clothes.
Somers didn’t need telling. She was a key player on the UK’s growing ethical fashion scene, acutely aware of the injustices routinely metered out to garment workers in the global South by fast-fashion and low-price apparel companies—many, household names—based Europe, North America and Australia.
As part of her research for an MA in Native American studies in the early 1990s Somers had visited Ecuador and met some women from local garment-making co-operatives. ‘I was not prepared for the inequitable trading patterns I witnessed. Seeing the weighing scales, an international symbol of justice, being loaded with wool on one side and then seeing the producers being charged a price which bore no resemblance to the stated cost per kilo, I felt a sense of outrage at the clear discrimination.’5 She thought she could make a difference, ‘even if it was just a small one, during my holidays. I decided I could probably design something.’6 She returned the next summer and ‘gave two co-operatives the financial resources to buy raw materials in bulk’. The resulting knitwear was so popular it sold out in six weeks. She gave up her studies to focus on improving the lives of more producers in the Andean region, eventually starting a business specialising in panama hats made the traditional way. In 2009, Pachacuti became the first brand in the world to gain a new World Fair Trade Organisation certification (which looks at a brand’s entire supply chain, rather than assessing products individually). Somers had proved you could build a thriving business without exploiting people. Fashion needed to wake up to itself. Fashion needed a revolution.
Somers jumped out of the bath and called her friend Orsola de Castro, designer of upcycled label From Somewhere and the driving force behind Estethica, the sustainable fashion hub at London Fashion Week. De Castro was reinventing the game. She’d gone from crocheting around the holes in an old jumper to becoming fashion’s go-to creative on textile waste, collaborating with prestigious design school Central Saint Martins and high-street giants like Topshop and Jigsaw. In the late ’90s, she and her partner Filippo Ricci had launched one of the first attention-grabbing dead-stock projects, Reclaim To Wear, making collections out of factory surplus cloth and production offcuts. De Castro was determined to push the conversation about the conventional fashion industry’s profligate wastefulness, and its impacts on people and planet. She too had been trying to figure out how best to respond to Rana Plaza.
‘We all felt this huge powerlessness,’ she tells me.7 ‘We knew something needed to change. Carry is a good friend, and she was also one of the most successful designers at Estethica. She’d come up with the name, Fashion Revolution, and we decided very quickly: we would build this movement. We got together and started mapping it out, clear that we didn’t want it to be a commemorative event for Rana Plaza; we wanted to build something that was going to be alive for the rest of the year, galvanising other people.’ Sustained action.
Their mission, they decided, would be to advocate for a more transparent fashion industry. Long-term, they would aim to work with policymakers. Although initially they didn’t imagine the campaign would be global, within months they’d been contacted by a Sydney-based activist keen to bring Fashion Revolution to Australia. Melinda Tually became their first country co-ordinator outside the UK. The first volunteer to join her was my friend Kirsten Lee. ‘By the time the campaign went live in April 2014, we had fifty countries wanting to take part,’ says de Castro.
In their first four years, they produced fanzines, podcasts and reports, and even managed to pull off ‘fashion question time’ in the House of Commons. They spoke at the European Parliament, and team members met with officials in South Africa, Malaysia and Cambodia.
Intuitively, they understood that governments and other old-style monolithic power structures, while key to the work of rewriting laws and regulations, would not and could not alone build the movement for change. As campaign strategist Erin Mazursky explains, that requires ‘an ongoing process of building leadership, relationships and avenues for getting involved. It catalyzes community involvement and finds localized ways to continuously bring new people into the movement and keep them there through a unified strategy and a broad common purpose.’8 In Fashion Revolution’s case, that purpose was ‘radically changing the way our clothes are sourced, produced and consumed’,9 with transparency, fairness and safety in mind.
Not that they consulted Mazursky or indeed any other political experts. They were winging it. De Castro, with characteristic positivity (‘I don’t do negative standpoints; when I’m told, “no”, I want to turn it into a “yes”’), paints that as a plus. ‘I think one of the reasons why people believed in us was because we were a little bit haphazard, a bit rough around the edges. Our naivety and innocence allowed us a kind of freedom.’
Take their name. The word revolution, meaning the overthrow of an established political system, has violent connotations dating back centuries. In the seventeenth, the Glorious Revolution deposed the Catholic King James II (of England and Ireland) and VII (of Scotland) from the throne, resulting in the bloody Jacobite rebellions. Vive la révolution! is still fighting talk; the guillotine remains one of the defining symbols of the French Revolution. In the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks murdered five Romanov children, as well as the Tsar and Tsarina, and while we cannot say exactly how many people died during the ensuing civil war, the consensus is around eight million. When we think of revolutions, we think of bloody coups. In China, two million people died during the Cultural Revolution over a terrifying decade from the mid-1960s.10 Mao Zedong’s propaganda warned dissidents, ‘Your days are numbered’,11 as his Red Guard attacked people in the street for wearing the wrong clothes, and officials hounded, imprisoned and murdered anyone suspected of being a capitalist or having bourgeois tendencies.
De Castro admits, ‘We thought at one point to change to Fashion Evolution, but we trusted the name. Potentially if we’d gone to some kind of branding expert, they would have said, “It’s too provoking. How is it going to play in China and in Russia?” Again, out of sheer instinct and ignorance, we went with it and it worked.’
The next step was persuading the right people to join their working committee or assist in other ways. Easy. De Castro and Somers might not have been seasoned campaigners, but they worked in fashion. Fashion is a networked community, and they were well connected. De Castro was prepping an exhibition in a Notting Hill gallery, with an opening night Q&A session with her friend Lucy Siegle, author of a book about unsustainable fashion called To Die For: Is fashion wearing out the world? Although she didn’t come aboard in a formal role, Siegle’s support of Fashion Revolution would be valuable. One of the loudest voices for social justice in British journalism, her Guardian columns are widely read. Headlines such as ‘How can we get young people to say no to fast fashion?’ and ‘How ethical are your high street clothes?’ could only help the movement.
In the aftermath of Rana Plaza, Siegle was churning out stories full of motivating details. ‘The gruesome accounts of rescuers cutting off limbs from trapped workers (sometimes without anaesthesia) surely leaves a stain on brands that no new collection, celebrity endorsement or micro-trend can wash away? Doesn’t it?’ she wrote on 5 May.12 Alas no, she concluded, as proven by a long list of less-widely-reported industrial accidents in Bangladesh, which had done precisely nothing to make the apparel industry take serious responsibility. The previous year, a fire in the Tazreen Fashions factory killed 117 people. In 2005 the Spectrum knitwear factory building had collapsed, killing sixty-four. Siegle quoted campaigner Livia Firth: ‘The industry is plagued by disposability and sensationalism. Fashion editorial, in my opinion, should be there to teach us about the beauty of craftsmanship, ateliers, seamstresses, to celebrate fashion’s heroes. [Without this] we don’t give a damn about the people who make the garments. They’re incidental.’13
Siegle and Firth had worked together on the first Green Carpet Challenge in 2010. Firth is an Italian film producer who at that time ran a little shop in west London that sold eco-friendly fashion and homewares. Her actor husband Colin Firth was up for a string of awards for his performance in the film A Single Man, including the Best Actor Oscar, and the plan was for Firth to wear ‘only ethical and sustainable dresses’ on the red carpet. A stylist friend Jocelyn Whipple was roped in to help. On Oscars night, Firth wore a black, ruffled upcycled gown by de Castro. ‘Every scrap of fabric is from end of rolls, discarded silk and organza off-cuts, silk chiffon un-finished petticoats (rescued from the trash) and off-cuts from the cutting room floor,’ wrote Firth on her blog.14
Having Firth and Siegle in their corner helped, but de Castro and Somers had to build a team. They now invited Whipple to join the committee, along with: Martine Parry, a media whizz from the Fairtrade Foundation; educator and supply-chain expert Ian Cook; Sarah Ditty, formerly of the Ethical Fashion Forum and textile recyclers Worn Again; and Roxanne Houshmand-Howell, who had worked for Katharine Hamnett for years. Hamnett is British design royalty and an outspoken environmental activist. She too became a vocal fan of Fashion Revolution, along with another London-based ethical fashion hero, People Tree’s Safia Minney. Their secret weapon was their graphic designer friend Heather Knight, formerly of Futerra, a highly regarded London creative agency that is a B Corp and works with brands selling positive change messages, from environmental groups to big fashion players like Kering and H&M.
They briefed Knight, stressing the idea was ‘to start a conversation that connected the whole fashion supply chain, from the cotton farmers, the ginners and spinners to the garment workers, the policymakers, the designers and students right through to the consumers. I think that’s what made us unique,’ says de Castro: ‘that we really wanted to be inclusive rather than shaming.’ On the first Fashion Revolution Day, on the anniversary of Rana Plaza, they would encourage people to turn their clothes inside out, show the label, snap a selfie and ask brands, ‘Who made my clothes?’ thus igniting a massive public, easy-access conversation about transparency. In theory, it would take minimal resources, which was handy, because they had no money.
They recruited student ambassadors. An online ‘action kit’ explained the inside-out concept, and suggested further ideas for engagement like clothing swaps and film screenings. From 2015 Andrew Morgan’s documentary about fast fashion, The True Cost, was a staple—Siegle and Firth were executive producers. And anyone could access the Fashion Revolution info graphics and quote tiles.
‘When Heather showed us her vision, it was perfect. It looked co-ordinated and designed from the start,’ says de Castro. ‘Instead of having people scribbling on a piece of paper, “Who made my clothes?”, we created branded posters. The result was something that looked like a very organised, very strategised campaign, even though it was total fake-it-till-you-make-it. In hindsight, the cleverest thing we did was allow our assets and content to be downloadable by anyone, with no hoops to jump through. We only realised afterwards that wasn’t how it was normally done then. Brands were protective and jealous of their logos, frightened of what would happen in terms of intellectual property or brand misrepresentation. We didn’t have that fear. We believed in the goodwill of the people, that they were going to be using it in a positive way.’
In the second year, more than a thousand brands and retailers responded, and over 2600 producers, garment workers and makers used the hashtag #imadeyourclothes on social media. People were screen-printing T-shirts with the ‘Who Made My Clothes?’ slogan. I painted it in giant black letters on the outside of my house. Full disclosure: I joined Fashion Revolution’s Australian advisory committee in 2014, persuaded to donate my journalism skills after a meeting with Siegle.
‘In my opinion we managed to put together the best team,’ says de Castro. ‘We cherry-picked people we trusted, we liked, we loved—this kind of mixture of creative and strategic and policy thinking, but also very free.’ It was the only way they knew. They hadn’t read the theory; had no well-thumbed copies of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals by their beds. But if they weren’t familiar with Alinsky’s famous quote, ‘The organizer becomes a carrier of the contagion of curiosity, for a people asking “why” are beginning to rebel,’ it didn’t matter: they knew already that curiosity was key. They wrote it in their tag line: ‘Be curious, find out, do something.’
‘I think the great strength of Fashion Revolution initially was its spontaneity,’ says de Castro. ‘It was a campaign begun by non-campaigners, so we broke all the rules. We didn’t break them because we decided we were going to; we simply didn’t know what we were doing, and so our approach was completely instinctive, and very human I think. What we did was what a group of friends would have done: I allow you into my thoughts, I allow you into my home, I let you share my clothes; that’s how it was for us.’
In 2018 they published their third Fashion Transparency Index, which ranks 150 of the world’s biggest fashion brands and retailers according to how much they disclose about their social and environmental policies, practices and impact. Brands were scored on five key areas, and the scores were converted into percentages. The average score was 21 per cent. An increasing number of brands are disclosing who their suppliers are, but fewer than a quarter have made a commitment to pay a living wage. The practice of disclosing—or even considering—environmental impacts remains in its infancy. Brands are getting better at sharing their policies and commitments, but ‘there is still much crucial information about the practices of the fashion industry that remains concealed, particularly when it comes to brands’ tangible impact on the lives of workers in their supply chains and on the environment.’15 A start, then, but there’s more campaigning to be done.
When Rana Plaza collapsed, Kalpona Akter, executive director of the Bangladesh Centre for Worker Solidarity, was touring America with a young garment worker who’d survived the Tazreen fire by jumping out of a third-floor window. ‘These tragedies can be prevented by multinational corporations like Walmart and the Gap that operate in Bangladesh,’ said Akter in a public statement.16 ‘Because of these companies’ negligence and wilful ignorance, garment workers are in danger every day. As we learn more details, we will better understand the brands that were manufactured in these factories, but we already know that the largest retailers in the world hold tremendous power to transform conditions for garment workers—mostly young women—in Bangladesh.’
She sped home. What she found there was even worse than she’d imagined. ‘I was there for seventeen days of the rescue operation,’ she tells me.17 ‘The air was polluted from people dying and their bodies spoiling in that death trap in the rubble. But at that same time, you can feel the pain, the screaming and the crying in the air, and you can’t take it. Just think about those families, who is having a picture in their hand … and asking everyone, “Did you see my son? Did you see my daughter?” Or kids are coming and they are saying, “Did you see my mum? This is my mum in this picture.”’ Many of the bodies were in such a bad state that they were unidentifiable by their faces alone. ‘So how are they recognising them? By the clothes, or sometimes by a nose pin.’
Kalpona Akter is a short, curvy lady in a blue sari with a kind, open face and twinkling eyes, and when we meet in the offices of Human Rights Watch, she gives me a huge, mama-bear hug. She looks sweet, but only a fool would underestimate this formidable political operator. A former child worker herself, Akter entered the garment industry at twelve years of age. By sixteen she was a union leader. A year later, she’d been fired as a troublemaker. Akter has withstood bullying and intimidation from her opponents, who wish to paint labour rights activists in Bangladesh as harbingers of unrest rather than leaders of a movement. By speaking out, Akter antagonises them. She has been imprisoned for her trouble (a close union colleague was murdered for his), but Akter is stubborn as well as smart. She refuses to give up.
When she tells me that as a consumer, my voice ‘is crucial and powerful in the supply chain,’ she knows that hers is even more so, because to listen to Akter is to be persuaded of your own power. ‘The ethical fashion movement,’ she says, ‘needs you.’18 If you wear clothes, you’d better listen. You’d better learn and you’d better start speaking out, she says. ‘After Rana Plaza there was a global outcry, and you consumers were phenomenal; you did raise your voices.’ Public pressure helped steer more than 200 brands, retailers and exporters to sign the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh. ‘You made these brands sign on to this legally binding agreement,’ she says.
I ask her if she feels that, globally, we have entered a new phase of consumer activism, a reawakening, and she says, ‘I do,’ and reminds me that each person who speaks out makes a difference. The star thrower again. ‘A small bell can make a huge noise when we are gathered together,’ she says. And now we must do more. Child labour, for example, is rife in the sweatshops of old Dhaka.
Ethical fashion is a feminist issue, because it is mostly women who wear fashion, and it is mostly women who sew it. It can be a tool for female emancipation and economic empowerment, says Akter, who stresses that she does not want to see a boycott of ‘Made in Bangladesh’—‘that means no jobs’—but the business of fashion manufacturing is still too often a context for repression.
I ask her to describe a typical day for a female garment worker in her country. It begins at 4.30 in the morning with queuing. One kitchen might be shared by twenty families. ‘It’s a hard battle she fights in the queue for cooking, [and for] using [the] toilet, because it’s maximum two-to-four toilets they have for almost a hundred people,’ says Akter. Work starts at 8 a.m. sharp. Being even slightly late for three days’ running means losing a full day’s pay. Once at her machine, our worker is so under the pump that ‘she [often] forgets she needs to drink.’ To use the bathroom, she must ask permission. Talking to her co-workers is discouraged. Usually, she must complete between 100 and 120 pieces an hour, and her job is to monotonously sew the same little bit of a garment, be it a side seam, a pocket, or joining a collar, over and over again. If she misses her targets, she must make them up during unpaid overtime. She gets home at 8 or 9 p.m. to cook, clean and wash clothes. ‘Her husband is hanging around with friends in the tea stall; he is not helping her,’ says Akter.
‘That’s a familiar story,’ I say.
‘And we need to change this,’ she says.
The minimum wage for garment workers in 2018 in Bangladesh is about US$68 per month. It is not enough for one person let alone an entire family, says Akter. A third or more goes on rent ‘in a semi-slum, a tin-shed house’. Food is very basic and there is no fridge. ‘She cannot afford meat more than one time a month, sometimes not at all; fish maybe twice a month. Mostly she lives on rice, vegetables and dal, no fruit. She doesn’t have any savings for medical expenses.’
A minimum wage is not a living wage. In October 2017, an Oxfam Australia report titled What She Makes revealed that on average just 4 per cent of the retail price of a piece of clothing sold in Australia but made offshore goes to the garment factory worker. ‘By not paying a living wage, big brands are keeping the women who make our clothes in poverty. But this can change,’ say the report’s authors, calling on consumers ‘to stand in solidarity with the women who make our clothes’ and let the big brands know it.
Soon Target’s Facebook page was filled with messages from shoppers politely warning that if the brand didn’t step up its commitment to pay a living wage, they would take their business elsewhere. While I can’t say for sure, it felt to me like these letters were written by perfectly ordinary women, not career activists or seasoned feminist campaigners. It felt like something wonderful was happening.