The transparency that may exist within the fashion industry is chiefly found in the first and second tiers of the manufacturing process. These tiers are the operations closest to the consumer, such as at factories that make the clothes and designers creating the pieces. But further down the supply chain, things get a little hazy.
This industry veil means that the United Nations Environment Programme report’s measure of a sustainable textile industry as “one that is resource-efficient and renewable resources-based, producing non-toxic, high quality and affordable clothing services and products while providing safe and secure livelihoods” is still some way off.
Most brands don’t work directly with the production of textiles, so there is seldom traceability at this point in the supply chain. World fashion activism movement Fashion Revolution’s launched their #WhoMadeMyFabric campaign as a call for fashion brands to disclose their suppliers and make information about textile production available to the public.
The campaign demands have zoomed in on the “notoriously opaque” fashion supply chain that the movement has called out for “enabling exploitative working conditions to thrive while obscuring who has the responsibility and power to redress them. When you look further down the supply chain, where fabrics are knitted or woven, textiles are treated and laundered, yarns are spun and dyed, fibres are sorted and processed and raw materials are grown and picked; there remains a widespread lack of transparency.”
“The whole fashion industry needs a radical paradigm shift and the way that we produce and consume clothes needs to be transformed,” Carry Somers, founder of Fashion Revolution, told Good on You.
- Cover image: Photo by Teona Swift on Pexels
- Learn more about the impacts of fashion’s convoluted global supply chains here.
