"Eleven years after Rana Plaza, where is the fashion industry in terms of transparency?", 24 April 2024

Eleven years ago today, on 24th April 2013, the Rana Plaza building in Savar, Bangladesh collapsed, killing more than 1,100 garment workers and injuring more than 2,500, many of them severely. All of those deaths and injuries could have been prevented had the five garment factories housed in the building evacuated on time like the other businesses in the building - among them a bank and shops.

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The last decade has seen transparency in fashion’s supply chains become a mainstream concern, and we have seen some of the world's biggest brands make encouraging progress since the launch of the Fashion Transparency Index (FTI) in 2017. However, looking at the wider picture, there are still too many brands that just aren’t disclosing anything year after year, overall industry progress is incredibly slow with an collective score if just 26 percent.

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While transparency has entered the mainstream, the industry is reluctant to make progress on the issues that matter most, such as living wages, overproduction and decarbonisation. Despite brands promising fair pay to the workers who make their clothes, they have little to show on progress over the last decade. Living wages are the most important issue to the people who make our clothes and yet still, 99 percent of the brands in the Index do not disclose the number of workers in their supply chain paid a living wage.

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In the UK, for example, we saw a pause on brands’ Modern Slavery Statement reporting as the government made a concession to pause on disclosure - unfortunately at a time when modern slavery risk was at an extreme high.