This is the dark side of your clothes, which nobody wants to tell you: chemicals, exploitation of workers and dumps of burnt fabrics

This is the dark side of your clothes, which nobody wants to tell you: chemicals, exploitation of workers and dumps of burnt fabrics

Nine years ago, the collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Bangladesh, an event that shook the world and showed the working conditions of those who make clothes. As every year, the non-profit movement Fashion Revolution returns to ask for wage justice. But what has changed since then? Our clothes still "stink" of chemicals, exploitation of workers, dumps of burnt fabrics. Since that April 24, 2013, where 1134 people died and about 2500 injured, too little has changed



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Fashion Revolution Week is back, a week of events and meetings to deepen, share and act. Promoted by the global Fashion Revolution movement, it fights for transparent, safe, fair, responsible fashion; this year's theme is Money Fashion Power:



the traditional fashion industry is based on the exploitation of labor and natural resources. Wealth and power are concentrated in the hands of a few, and growth and profit are rewarded above all else. Big brands and retailers produce too fast, and manipulate us into a toxic cycle of overconsumption.

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The movement was born in the aftermath of the collapse of the building Rana Plaza of 24 April 2013 where 1134 people died and about 2500 injured.

An entire eight-story commercial building came down in Savar, in a sub-district of Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh that became the symbol of the dull side of fashion. An event that shook the whole world and raised that thin veil that covered the tacit distortions of an ever-expanding sector, as always at the expense of underpaid and harassed workers as well as the environment.

Index

A manifesto for the transparency of fashion

What do these movements ask of the powerful and varied fashion sector? Supranational laws that guarantee a fair remuneration to the many invisible workers of this sector structured in Chinese boxes, greater security of the conditions of commitment and attention to the environment.

That event nine years ago showed most people how they worked and still work to produce, without stopping, garments that briefly end up in our closets and then end their life in landfills.



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Since then, things have not changed enough because, in the fragmentation of production lines, it becomes almost impossible to introduce and guarantee decent wages and adequate working conditions.

Overproduction, the disease of many brands

The relationship between fashion, transparency and sustainability is a complicated relationship. Things do not always change with the speed we would like, although there is a slow movement that is making brands, more or less high-sounding, active in this sense.

In the most intense period of the Covid-19 pandemic, shopping habits have seen a radical change, out of necessity and ease, towards e-commerce. The luck of many realities, in particular fast-fashion, which have intensified their creations as never before. Lots of offers and bargain prices to keep a growing demand for clothes alive.

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Certainly one cannot think that an ultra cheap garment, made on the other side of the world and that arrives in our homes in a few days, can be packaged in compliance with who knows what rules from the quality of the materials, to the dubious workmanship, passing through shipments. , sorting in distribution centers until arriving at the front door. All this makes us wonder: in the 9 years that have passed since that collapse, what has changed?



Among the textile workers in Bangladesh

American documentarian and producer Livia Firth has returned to Bangladesh several times to see for herself if and how things were changing. In 2021 you made the documentary Fashionscape: a living wage to tell the everyday life of those trapped in unhealthy contexts, from pay to life in the factory where you work in drums and suffer harassment and violence.

Livia, nothing will change until there is a transnational agreement on wages otherwise, brands will continue to move from one country to another in search of the cheapest production.

A collection of testimonies that tell how much there is still to be done because clothing workers still die from disasters in factories, endure inhumane hours, suffer violence from superiors.

Compared to ten years ago, the production and consumption of clothing has grown everywhere but the wages of these workers remain the same. The documentary maker offers a bitter reflection: the "real cost" of fast fashion is paid by workers wherever they are located.

The life cycle of a garment

There are also those who have decided to follow the life cycle of a garment like Maxine Bédat. The founder of the ThinkTank New Standard Institute, which monitors the data of this sector, has created a book with the emblematic title Unveiled: the life and death of a garment. A two-year journey started on the cotton fields, destroyed by the chemical agents used for textile overproduction.

Maxine has followed the raw cotton from Texas to China where it is spun with polyester for an endless production of reels, in the same factories that spill chemicals in now putrid rivers.

He went on to Bangladesh where he met some women who assemble those fabrics and, ironically, some are climate refugees now employed in an industry that helps not stop the climate emergency. Back home he visited the distribution center until the last stop, in Ghana, in open landfills with high flames and black clouds from toxic fumes to the tissues that are burned.

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The European Commission has recently launched a first package of proposals to make clothing products more sustainable and to promote circular economy models with a target of 2030. It is not far away but we need to accelerate, very much, because this would mean honoring all people who have (already) lost their life, dignity and the right to a daily life in health and safety.

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Fonti: Fashion Revolution/News Standard Insitute/

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