Which leads us here – to Fashion Revolution Week 2020, amidst a global pandemic, the most challenging and uncertain time many of us will ever live through. In a time of unified isolation, I’m inviting you all to join me in a Revolution From My Bed. This blog series will uncover the plethora of human rights violations that have quietly come to define the global clothing and textiles supply chain, untangling the complex relationship between business, law, policy, gender and culture. I hope it will equip you with the knowledge to rise up, and with conviction, demand that the people who make our clothes are visible and their human rights are respected.
The power and magnitude of fast fashion is born out of the weakness and diminishment of International Human Rights Law.
The term ‘Fast Fashion’ is defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as “clothes that are made and sold cheaply, so that people can buy new clothes often.” We’ll return to this definition later, but to elaborate on the colossal scale this industry, let’s quickly look at some of the facts available.
The clothing and textile industry, as a whole, contributes $2.4 trillion to global manufacturing, and employs around 75 million people worldwide. In the last 15 years, clothing production has approximately doubled and around 150 billion garments are now produced annually. Long gone are the days of two collections per year; Zara claim to put out 24 with H&M releasing between 12 and 16. In fact, during The True Cost, we hear Lucy Siegle (journalist, author, and one of my personal heroes) discuss how these fast fashion chains now arguably release 52 collections per year, with new garments entering stores every single week.
As a brief case study, let’s look at Zara closer. A Spanish brand of humble beginnings, their first store opened in 1975 in the city of A Coruña, and within ten years they incorporated their handful of stores under Inditex. Fast forward to 2020, and they have nearly 3,000 stores in 96 countries, thanks to their “ability to develop a new product and get it to stores within two weeks, while other retailers take six months”. I don’t need to tell you that this model of retailing has created a colossal income for the company. In the financial year 2018-2019, they were ranked as the leading European based fast-fashion company, making just over 22 Billion GBP. Out of curiosity, I’ve worked out this would equate to somewhere around 1,409,881,176 of these tops or 751,717,239 pairs of these “premium” jeans.
Maybe a clearer way to illustrate their magnitude is to tell you that Amancio Ortega, founder of Inditex (of which he now owns around 60%), is worth 64.1 Billion USD (around 52 Billion GBP) Back to Who Made My Clothes – I think at this point it is imperative to reflect on the disparity of wealth between the maker and the profiteer. The legal minimum wage for garment workers in Bangladesh is 8,000 taka (£73.85) a month. If this minimum is respected (again, we’ll come to this later), it would take one of these workers around 58,677,499 years to earn this amount of money.
Dizzying. Or actually, more honestly, despicable.