Some of the world’s most popular clothing brands, including Forever 21 and Michael Kors, have been slammed by a new report for not being upfront with customers about their supply chains.
According to the report that ranks clothing brands on transparency, high-end, expensive clothing companies including Prada, Fendi and Hermes are among the worst offenders, with Chanel coming in dead last.
On ranking 40 major fashion companies on how transparent they are about their supply chains by advocacy organizations Fashion Revolution and Ethical Consumer, found that 40 percent of the companies analyzed don’t appear to have systems to monitor whether they are compliant with labor standards.
Nearly three years after the collapse of a factory in Bangladesh that killed more than a thousand people and injured 2,500 more, the report found it’s still difficult for consumers — and even fashion companies — to answer the question, “who made my clothes?”
In the lead-up to the April 24 anniversary of the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh, the organizations are encouraging consumers to ask clothing companies about every aspect of their supply chains, from where the raw materials came from to who stitched the clothing together.
The report mentions
“Lack of transparency costs lives”, “It is impossible for companies to make sure human rights are respected and that environmental practices are sound without knowing where their products are made, who is making them and under what conditions.”
‘Lack of transparency costs lives.’
The highest ranked company was Levi Strauss & Co, followed closely by Inditex, which owns Zara, and H&M, which owns Cheap Monday and & Other Stories. But while the report commended these companies for their transparency, it cautioned that a high transparency rating doesn’t mean clothing isn’t made in dangerous conditions.
In H&M’s case, the high transparency ranking comes on the heels of another advocacy group slamming the company for “severe delays” in building repairs in 32 Bangladesh factories that supply its clothing. Several advocacy groups criticised H&M for its lack of progress in safety improvements after it endorsed the Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety, a legally-binding agreement that more than 100 brands signed onto in the aftermath of the Rana Plaza collapse.
VICE News reached out to a handful of the brands ranked on the transparency index to ask them if the report was fair and whether they would tell us about their supply chains. Only H&M and Lululemon sent responses.
‘Many companies do not really know where their clothes are being made. ‘
Many companies do not really know where their clothes are being made. The vast majority of today’s fashion brands do not own their manufacturing facilities, making it difficult to monitor or control working conditions through the supply chain.
Fashion Revolution said it sent a questionnaire to 40 fashion companies, but only 10 filled it out. The other 30 companies received scores based on information they made public.
“For those companies that did not reply, it is impossible for our researchers to know anything beyond what they are communicating publicly online,” the report stated. “Therefore these companies may have received lower scores while companies who did fill out the questionnaire had the opportunity to tell us more and thus potentially score higher.”
