Yesterday was the 5 year anniversary of the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh. 1,138 garment workers died, after being threatened with the loss of their jobs if they didn’t go to work in a factory that was known to be structurally unsafe.
There were five garment factories in Rana Plaza manufacturing clothes for big name fashion brands. Not just cheap, fast fashion companies including Primark, Matalan and H&M, but for supposedly high quality labels too.
I’ve been trying to write something on the blog about this a while, but what can I say? I can’t tell you where to shop. But I do think that people need to be much more aware of the conditions under which their clothes are produced, which is what makes them so artificially cheap.
Fashion Revolution, a campaign started in the wake of the Rana Plaza disaster, has an excellent ten-point manifesto of what a genuine FASHION REVOLUTION could look like. Culturally, we’re very far away from it at the moment, but every single tiny little step in the right direction helps.