Fashionrevolution.org



Q&A with Carry Somers 2016

What is Fashion Revolution Day?

On 24 April 2013, 1134 people were killed and 2500 injured when the Rana Plaza factory complex collapsed in Dhaka, Bangladesh. We believe 1134 is too many people to lose from the planet in one factory on one terrible day without that leading to revolutionary change in the fashion industry. The Rana Plaza was a metaphorical call to arms. 

That’s when Fashion Revolution was born.

We are people from all around the world who make the fashion industry work. We are the people who wear clothes. And we are the people who make them. And we want

to ignite a revolution to radically change the way our clothes are sourced, produced and purchased.

We have named the anniversary of the Rana Plaza disaster Fashion Revolution Day. This year, Fashion Revolution Day falls on a Sunday, so we have created Fashion Revolution Week: a week of activities around the world to demand a fairer, cleaner, more transparent and more beautiful fashion industry.

What are you trying to achieve?

The global fashion industry is opaque, exploitative and environmentally damaging and desperately needs revolutionary change. Fashion Revolution wants to ignite a revolution to radically change the way our clothes are sourced, produced and purchased. We believe transparency is the first step to transform the industry, and it starts with one simple question: who made my clothes?

We no longer know who makes our clothes and we don’t know the true cost of the things we buy. The fashion supply chain is fractured and the producers have become faceless. This is costing lives. We believe that rebuilding the broken links across the whole supply chain, from farmer to consumer, is the only way to transform the entire industry. Fashion Revolution brings everyone together to make that happen.

Who Made My Clothes should be a simple question. Most people would expect a brand to at least know the final factory where their garments are cut and sewn. The Behind the Barcode Fashion Report published last year found that 48% of brands hadn’t traced the factories where their garments were made, 75% didn’t know where their fabrics came from and 91% didn’t know where the raw materials came from.

We want to see an increasing number of brands make their supply chains more transparent, because we can’t start to tackle exploitation until we can see it. We want to see the faces and hear the stories of thousands of farmers, makers and producers.

This year, brands and retailers will be challenged to take responsibility for the individuals and communities on which their business depends. We want people around the world to show their label and ask #whomademyclothes. We want every stakeholder in the fashion supply chain – retailers, brands, factories, private label manufacturers - to demonstrate transparency and show us the people who make our clothes, answering with the hashtag #imadeyourclothes

How can people get involved?

The Fashion Revolution thrives on curiosity. It encourages us to look at what’s right under our noses at the clothes we’re wearing. It encourages us not only to think about these questions, but to ask them. We want people around the world to show their label, post a photograph on social media, tag the brand and ask the question #whomademyclothes. By doing this, we are applying pressure in the form of a perfectly reasonable question that brands and retailers should be able to answer. We are asking them to publicly acknowledge the people who make our clothes. Brands’ advertising and PR strategies rarely acknowledge that the clothes they sell have been made by thousands of people working in factories, fields and other hidden places around the world.

Fashion Revolution’s mantra is Be Curious, Find Out and Do Something About It. We don’t want to be fobbed off with a link to a brand’s CSR policy. We want real answers. Who made our clothes and where?

Until we know the answers to those fundamental questions and start to create real traceability and transparency in the fashion supply chain, we can’t start to dig deeper and ask those other questions which desperately need answering. What are their pay and working conditions like? What are the environmental consequences of clothing’s manufacture? Could things be better? Are things better? And what can we do if we don’t like what we find?

If people want to find out more, we have education packs, our How to Be A Fashion Revolutionary booklet and lots of ways to get involved on our website

What’s new this year?

This year, Fashion Revolution Day falls on a Sunday, so we have created Fashion Revolution Week: a week of activities around the world to demand a fairer, cleaner, more transparent and more beautiful fashion industry. Fashion Question Time at the Houses of Parliament will be held on Monday 18th April and will mark the start of Fashion Revolution Week.

Together with Ethical Consumer, we are working on a Transparency Index, assessing 40 of the top selling brands in the UK, most of which are well-known global brands. The Index will be published in April 2016. We will look at different elements of transparency, including policy and commitment; tracking and traceability; social and environmental audits and remediation; and engagement and collaboration with other supply chain initiatives. The aim of the transparency ranking will is to benchmark fashion brands on their supply chain transparency and to encourage the adoption of best practice. We have also published our first White Paper setting out what sort of changes we expect to see, and what we’re asking the industry and other stakeholders to do about it.

We launched the Haulternative last year, with YouTube vloggers including Noodlerella, CutiePieMarzia, Shameless Maya and Bip Ling. It’s about how you can do a different kind of haul. A way of refreshing your wardrobe without buying new clothes, from upcycling to swaps to finding gems in charity shops. We call it the #haulternative. We had almost 2 million views of the #haulternative videos online last year. This year, we are asking fashion lovers from all over the world to join in and create their own haulternative video.

Why should people get involved? Consumers didn’t cause this problem.

It is true that consumers didn’t directly cause the fractured and opaque supply chains prevalent in so much of the fashion industry today, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t be part of the solution. Brands and retailers may not be paying attention to what the people in their supply chain are saying, they may not even know who the people in their supply chain are, but they are most certainly paying attention to what their customers are saying.

I was told by an industry insider that for every person who took asked a brand #whomademyclothes on social media, the brands took it as representing 10,000 other people who thought the same way, but couldn’t be bothered to do anything about it. We have incredible power as consumers, if we choose to use it.

What changes does Fashion Revolution want to see in the fashion industry?

In December we issued a White Paper It’s Time for a Fashion Revolution setting out the reasons why we need more transparency across the fashion industry, from seed to waste.

So much is hidden within the fashion supply chain, largely due to its scale and complexity. Almost nobody has a clear picture how it all really works, from fibre through to disposal. Unlike food labelling, the labels on our clothes tell us very little.

In order to create a sustainable fashion industry for the future, brands, and retailers must start to take responsibility for the people and communities on which their business depends. Tragedies like Rana Plaza are preventable, but they will continue to happen until every stakehholder in the fashion supply chain is responsible and accountable for their actions and impacts.

And it’s not just brands. It’s the myriad other stakeholders along the chain too. Private and White label manufacturers are responsible for a huge amount of what we buy on the high street,  Li & Fung, for example, supplies 40% of all clothing sold in the U.S, yet most people are unaware of their existence and so there is little public pressure on them. Not one of these companies publishes a list of their suppliers or vendors, nor do they publish any social and environmental sustainability reports.

In the future, brands will have to be able to answer the question #whomademyclothes. Answering this question requires transparency, and this implies honesty, openness, communication and accountability. This information also needs to be made available to the consumer in a way which informs and educates and starts to rebuild public trust in the fashion industry.

Do you think Fashion Revolution has a chance of changing anything?

Change is possible. There is a huge body of evidence which shows that people can radically transform their behaviour or beliefs in the face of the right kind of impetus. Most of the public is still not aware that human and environmental abuses are endemic across the fashion and textiles industry and that what they’re wearing could have been made in an exploitative way. We don’t want to wear that story anymore.

Fashion Revolution has already begun to spark a global conversation about the social and environmental issues facing the fashion industry. We have been been particularly successful over the past three years at engaging the public in these issues and giving them tangible ways to become part of the solution. We have created a How To Be A Fashion Revolutionary booklet this year which is full of inspiration and ideas about how we can all use our voices and power to transform the fashion industry as we know it. We believe fashion can become a force for good.

What was the global reach from last year’s campaign?

Our hashtag #whomademyclothes had 63 million reach and 124 million potential impacts on 24 April and we trended worldwide on Twitter on the day.

Fashion Revolution's press coverage for the year, as measured by Meltwater monitoring, was impressive to say the least. From April to December, we achieved 21.69 billion potential viewership, 8.5 billion of whom were unique users. April coverage included all major international publications such as The Diplomat, as well as fashion magazines, such as ID, Drapers, Grazia, Vogue and Marie Claire. Fashion Revolution was featured in TV broadcasts around the world, such as Fox News and CNN. Fashion Revolution founders both featured on prominent TV and radio broadcasting stations, such as BBC World Service which has a 210 million listeners and BBC World Business News, the most widely watched BBC channel with 75 million viewers.

Press coverage for our video 'The 2 Euro T-shirt: a Social Experiment' was also extensive. The video went viral (and was spread on social media by celebrities such as actor Ashton Kutcher and stylist Brian Boy) and has accumulated over 7 Million views to date. In June the video won the Bronze prize at the Cannes Lion Film Festival and this achievement was widely reported by international press.

This level of press reach means that the transparency spotlight is shining ever brighter onto the fashion supply chain. There is nowhere to hide. The fashion industry needs to recognise that the future of fabric has to be cleaner, The future of fabric has to be sustainable. Millions of people are calling for change and this is being widely reported around the world, with press coverage extending even beyond the 83 countries who form part of the Fashion Revolution movement. Ultimately brands will have to listen.

Is this just a social media campaign, or are you working towards policy and legislative change?

Fashion Revolution participated in high level EU, G7, UN and COP21 events last year. We co-organised events at the European Parliament, House of Commons, House of Lords and beyond.

We have begun to see governments and policymakers in the EU and beyond start to address transparency and sustainability over the past twelve months. We are certain this issue will remain on the policy agenda due to the launch of the European Commission’s Garment Initiative in Spring 2016, on which we will be collaborating as a key stakeholder. Through this initiative and more widely at a global level, we want to see supply chain transparency and responsibility in the fashion industry in practice, not just in principle. The scope of this should also be extended to cover the entire garment, textile and fashion product value chain: from farmers to artisans and workers right through to end consumers.

Fashion Revolution would like to see the EU adopt similar legislation to the UK’s Modern Slavery Act. This is a huge step forward in ensuring that large companies become directly and legally responsible for the condition of everyone working in their supply chains. 

What do you say to people who were horrified at the disaster, but can’t afford to pay extra for ethically–sourced clothing?

We’re not asking people to boycott their favourite stores, we need to change the fashion industry from within. By asking the brands and retailers where we like to shop Who Made My Clothes? we can put pressure on them to be more transparent about their supply chains.

In terms of the price, three quarters of those questioned in a YouGov/Global Poverty Project survey said they would be likely to pay an extra 5% for their clothes if there was a guarantee workers were being paid fairly and working in safe conditions. It has been estimated that putting as little as 25p onto the cost of a garment made in Bangladesh would provide the producers with a living wage and pay for factories to meeting fire and building safety standards.

Has much has changed since Rana Plaza?

Rana Plaza was inevitable. There are ever longer supply chains, and a resulting shift in responsibility. However, this was a tragedy that could have taken place in any fast fashion producing country. Rana Plaza happens to be in Bangladesh. What happened reflects a global trend of increased 'demand' which feeds the fast fashion supply chain.  

There have been many improvements in the fashion supply chain since the dust has settled on the Rana Plaza disaster, although it is unfortunate that it has taken a tragedy of this scale to start to bring about change.

The Bangladesh Accord is a significant milestone towards better working conditions in Bangladesh, and hopefully throughout the industry. However, as we have heard through numerous recent reports in the media, 90% of the structural, electrical and fire-safety improvement plans are behind schedule. 13% of suppliers still haven’t removed locks from doors which could be used as fire exits.

What will really keeps factories compliant is when all workers have a voice and they can speak out when something is wrong. Fashion Revolution has been working closely with IndustriALL Global Union and the Solidarity Centre to highlight the role of trade unions in bringing change to the industry.

Fashion Revolution’s is working to re-connect the supply chain, showing the faces and giving a voice to the makers of our clothes, highlighting their stories, and showing where change still needs to happen.

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