Who Made My Clothes? After 13 Years, This Question Still Demands an Answer.
The cracks appeared on April 23rd, 2013.
Not metaphorical ones. Literal, two-inch-deep fractures running through the concrete walls and support columns of an eight-story building on the outskirts of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Workers saw them. They refused to go inside. A television crew arrived and filmed the damage. The building was evacuated.
The shops and the bank on the lower floors closed immediately. But the warnings were ignored by the garment factory owners on the upper floors. Cleanclothes
That night, managers contacted workers, instructing them to return the following morning. Some were told the cracks had been inspected and declared harmless. Others were threatened with loss of wages or dismissal if they refused. Compact Histories More than 3,600 workers — 80 percent of them women aged twenty years or younger — were ordered back in to work their standard shift of thirteen to fourteen hours. EBSCO According to some witnesses, thugs hired by building owner Sohel Rana beat the most recalcitrant workers to force them into the unstable building. Penn State Engineering
Early in the workday on April 24th, power to the building stopped, cracks widened and concrete began to fall onto workers. It took less than ninety seconds for the eight-story building to collapse and kill 1,134 workers and maim more than 2,500 others.
A tragedy implies the absence of fault and this wasn't that. The collapse of Rana Plaza was the final, violent consequence of ignored warnings, illegal construction, and the decision to prioritise production over human life.
And the brands? The Walmarts and Benettons and Primarks whose labels were found in the rubble? Brands knew about the danger of the country's multi-story buildings yet refused to take action. They knew that the coercion implicit in poverty wages severely limited workers' choices, and vitally, that limitations on the fundamental right to organise left workers exposed to serious risks. Cleanclothes Each of these brands was a complicit participant in the creation of an environment that ultimately led to the deaths and maiming of thousands of individuals.
The "we didn't know, it was a sub-contractor" defense is a legal excuse, not a moral position. The only reason your product exists is because of the human who made it. Hiding behind layers of supply chain complexity when it's convenient, and claiming credit for the end product when it sells is just cowardice dressed up as corporate governance.
Rana Plaza is the symbol the world latched onto — the disaster too large to look away from. But it was not an isolated event. It came exactly five months after the deadly Tazreen Fashions factory fire, where at least 112 workers died, many of them locked inside the building. Amnesty International
Conservative estimates record 5,608 worker deaths in Bangladesh alone between 2013 and 2023 — meaning that even after Rana Plaza, at least one worker continued to die each day on average in mostly preventable workplace incidents. Amnesty International Disturbingly, Rana Plaza was not a wake-up call that changed everything. For too many brands, it was a PR crisis that eventually blew over.
Out of that rubble, a movement was born.
Fashion Revolution was founded by Carry Somers and Orsola de Castro in the wake of the Rana Plaza disaster. It has grown to become the world's largest fashion activism movement, mobilising citizens, brands and policymakers through research, education and advocacy. Fashion Revolution
Its founding question was deceptively simple: Who made my clothes?
Four words. The power in them is that almost nobody could answer. Not the brands. Not the retailers. Certainly not most consumers. An entire $1.7 trillion global industry had been built on the premise that you wouldn't ask, and they wouldn't tell.
But why should you care? You're buying a hair tie or a t-shirt or a pair of jeans, not filing a human rights report. The worker in Bangladesh or Turkey or Pakistan or India — what does their situation have to do with yours?
Everything.
You did not choose where you were born. Neither did she. The difference between your life and the life of a 20-year-old woman sewing garments in a crumbling building for $12 a week is not intelligence, work ethic, or character. It's geography. It's the family you came into. It's a lottery neither of you entered voluntarily.
When we look away from that — when we buy the $3 pack of hair ties or the $7 t-shirt and don't ask a single question — we are using the privilege of our geography to push down on someone who had no say in theirs. And the billionaires who own these fast fashion empires are counting on exactly that. They count on the distance between you and the person making your clothes to feel insurmountable. They count on you not asking. Because if you asked — really asked, and demanded answers — the answer would most likely stop you from spending your money with them.
More than 80 billionaires have significant financial stakes in the fashion industry, holding combined estimated wealth of around $1.5 trillion. Let that land for a moment.
Bernard Arnault, whose LVMH empire includes Louis Vuitton, Dior, and Sephora, has amassed a personal fortune that a garment worker earning Bangladesh's minimum wage would need approximately 173 million years to earn. Amancio Ortega built Zara into a global fast fashion juggernaut — 123 million years for that one. Anxiety
The money required to pay every garment worker a living wage, to fund clean supply chains, to end the textile waste colonialism choking the rivers of Ghana and Kenya — it already exists within the system. Anxiety In other words, we're already spending what it takes for fairness across the industry; however, it is sitting in the personal fortunes of the people who built that system deliberately, and who depend on your silence to keep it intact.
Your curiosity is their biggest threat.
The damage doesn't stop at the factory gate.
The garment and textile industry employs approximately 75 million people worldwide — with women forming 75 percent of the global workforce. Global Living Wage Coalition
When you include the cotton farmers, rubber tappers, dye house workers, logistics workers, and every community built around a garment town, 430 million people — roughly 12 percent of the entire global workforce — are employed in fashion and textile production. UniformMarket That is not an abstract statistic. That is almost the population of the United States, in one industry, and most of them are among the most economically vulnerable people on the planet.
Consider conventional cotton. It sounds natural. Wholesome, even. But intensive pesticide use and poor irrigation practices in conventional cotton production have led to such a high level of contamination that fields have become totally barren and drinking water supplies over vast areas are polluted. New Internationalist
In Uzbekistan — one of the world's largest cotton exporters — the consequences are catastrophic. Up to half of the deaths in the Karakalpakstan region come from respiratory illness caused by exposure to pesticide-laden dust. One in every 20 children is born with an abnormality, and the rate of genetic mutation in some groups is 3.5 times higher than normal. Ejfoundation These are communities that grow cotton for the global fashion industry. Their water table didn't poison itself.
Now follow those garments to the dye house. Of the 3,000 chemicals used in textile washing and dyeing, at least 250 are known hazardous substances. Workers breathe them. The customer wearing those trousers that are now that particular shade of teal is not in that town. They never see the river. In garment towns across Asia, local waterways run the colour of the season — vivid blue one month, dusty rose the next — because dye house waste flows unchecked into rivers that communities drink from, fish in, and bathe their children in.
And when we're done with the garment? When it's worn once and discarded because that's what the system is designed for (planned obsolescence in the hair accessory industry, explained)? It doesn't disappear. Every week, approximately 15 million items of clothing are received in Ghana alone, and nearly half are unsellable. Greenpeace
Ghana's President describes the Korle Lagoon — once a vital water source for Accra's residents — as "the most polluted spot on Earth," choked with the synthetic textile waste of the Global North. Time Fishers who once depended on the lagoon report that their nets are more likely to catch t-shirts than tilapia. Sierra Club This practice constitutes fashion waste colonialism: overproduction and overconsumption in the Global North, with countries like Ghana, Kenya, and Nigeria paying the price. Greenpeace
The brand that made those garments is not in Accra. They're not watching the river. They're not breathing the air from the burn piles where unsellable synthetic clothes are lit to fuel public washhouses.
They are, however, very much still making more clothes for more profits.
Now ask yourself: who makes your hair accessories?
Go ahead. Try to find out. Google your current brand.
Look past the marketing. Look for the actual facility, the actual workers, the actual certifications. Look for someone — anyone — at that company telling you a real story about a real person who made the product on your wrist.
We'll wait.
The hair accessory industry is, frankly, one of the least transparent corners of fashion. Most brands will give you a colour selection and maybe a vague nod to "quality materials." Don't even get us started on greenwashing (a topic we've gone deep on before). Ask where those materials come from, who grew the cotton, who processes the (likely synthetic) rubber, who sews the tie, and the silence is deafening. A token "made in China" — buried somewhere on the packaging if you look hard enough...