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Little progress has been made in the past year by brands to disclose their sustainability efforts, according to non-profit Fashion Revolution’s latest Index, despite pressure for the “bare minimum”.
“We have to ask ourselves how supply chains got so complicated that brands can’t find or share the information needed,” says Fashion Revolution’s policy and research manager Liv Simpliciano.
The Fashion Transparency Index ranks 250 brands with annual turnover of at least $400 million on the information they publicly disclose about sustainability, across 246 categories from animal welfare and biodiversity to purchasing practices, working conditions and recycling. Notable gaps were in production volumes, suppliers beyond tier one, and garment worker rights. The average score was 24 per cent, a gain of only 1 per cent versus 2021 — a disappointing lack of progress from an industry so keen to make sustainability statements, says Simpliciano. The overall average among the 90 brands who have been involved since its formation in 2017 was higher at 34 per cent including Abercrombie & Fitch, Hermès and Zalando.
Of the participating brands, one-third scored less than 10 per cent overall, including Valentino and Dolce & Gabbana. This includes 17 brands who scored 0 per cent, with Jil Sander, Tom Ford and Max Mara among them. (Dolce & Gabbana, Valentino, Jil Sander, Tom Ford and Max Mara did not immediately respond to requests for comment.) The top slot was tied between three brands — Italian retailer OVS and mass-market retailers Kmart Australia and Target Australia — which scored 78 per cent each. No brands scored 80 per cent or above. “It’s concerning how much revenue is captured by brands disclosing little to no information,” says Simpliciano.
Transparency centres on climate commitments and other plans, but little is shared on progress and results. This is hindering stakeholder understanding of how much has changed and how far there is to go. “If we don’t know the outcomes, we don’t know whether the actions taken were robust enough,” says Simpliciano.
In the past, some brands have used their ranking in the Fashion Transparency Index to justify greenwashing, claiming to be sustainable on the basis that they are among the most transparent. Incoming legislation on greenwashing and a number of international investigations into brands making sustainability claims are in the pipeline to prevent that, and as of last year, Fashion Revolution put tighter brand guidelines to avoid this happening.
“The Fashion Transparency Index does not claim to provide ranking for brands to be considered sustainable; it is not a shopping guide,” says policy and research coordinator Delphine Williot. “If a brand scores very highly on the Index, it simply means they’re transparent, which means we can hold them accountable.” Transparency is not sustainability, but rather the necessary disclosure of information that allows consumers to make more sustainable choices, and brands to measure and reduce their environmental impacts, Williot adds.
“Until brands publicly disclose all the information necessary to hold them accountable for their impacts, being un-transparent feels like a deliberate strategy to reinforce the status quo,” adds Simpliciano.
Policies versus impact
While 28 per cent of brands were willing to share their new circular fashion initiatives to divert waste, they are less forthcoming about the waste they currently generate. Eight per cent share their post-production waste volumes and 10 per cent share pre-production waste volumes. There is a discrepancy between communication and impact too, says Simpliciano. While 45 per cent of brands have published targets to use more sustainable materials, only 37 per cent provide definitions of what “sustainable” materials actually are. “This suggests that brands are more interested in profiting from this problem than addressing it,” she says.
In other places, policies are lacking entirely. Less than a third of brands disclose a decarbonisation target covering operations and supply chain, which has been verified by the Science Based Targets Initiative. Less than a third of brands report on their carbon footprint at processing level and 22 per cent report at raw material level, but this figure has improved compared to previous years.
Fashion Revolution says that many brands avoid the term degrowth — meaning a managed reduction of the economy to bring it in line with planetary boundaries — preferring phrases like “decoupling economic growth from product volume”. Degrowth is an increasingly hot topic in sustainable fashion, as brands and retailers reckon with how to bring production and consumption in line with the Paris Climate Agreement. “Degrowth is a scary word but absolutely necessary to address,” says Simpliciano. “It isn’t just a fast fashion problem either, it’s a systemic problem. We have seen certain luxury brands disclosing their production volumes, and they are overproducing too.”
Transparency is crucial to degrowth and vice versa, continues Simpliciano. “No business can survive unless it knows how much it is producing. However, 85 per cent of brands do not disclose their annual production volumes, despite mounting evidence of clothing waste around the world,” she explains. Those that do disclose often focus on tonnes of clothes rather than units, which is useless to consumers without context. “Without this insight, we don’t understand who is accountable for the mountains of waste ending up in Ghana and Chile, shedding microfibres and microplastics into our ecosystems, and clogging the oceans.”
Closing the inequality gap with suppliers
Inequality is rife within fashion supply chains, but brands share very little information about their work to counter this. On human rights, 96 per cent of brands do not disclose the number of workers currently paid a living wage, and only 27 per cent have a public strategy for achieving living wages throughout their supply chains for the third year running. Just 11 per cent disclose their purchasing code of conduct, which can lead to wage theft and wage disruption, as seen during the pandemic.
“What we’re talking about with purchasing practices is power relations,” says global policy and campaign director Maeve Galvin. “If brands give suppliers unfair payment terms, they don’t necessarily feel comfortable challenging them, because suppliers know how easily brands can move on to their competitors.”
Simpliciano calls out the Dutch brand Zeeman as the only brand to share its due diligence aligned buyer commitment contract, which outlines what the buyer commits to: paying the suppliers on time, responsible exit strategies, contract pricing that covers the cost of production and responsible business conduct, and reasonable assistance to support supplier’s ability to uphold buyers’ human rights standards. Fashion Revolution is launching the Good Clothes, Fair Pay initiative on 19 July, gathering one million signatures from EU citizens to demand living wage legislation across the garment, textile and footwear sectors.
As with many sustainability issues, wider legislation is needed. According to Fashion Revolution, brands often evade taxes or purposely go into administration to reap tax benefits and avoid paying suppliers and workers, only to reopen under a different name — a process dubbed “phoenixing”.
The data points to fashion’s more systemic challenges too. “Just four per cent of brands disclose their water consumption at the raw material level,” explains Simpliciano. “This is interesting because most sourcing countries are also water scarce, so the human right to water is deprioritised to make clothes that may only be worn a handful of times. This is just one example of how the fashion industry is built on colonialism.”
The big question is how brands can treat the people in their supply chains fairly when they don’t actually know who is involved. Disclosure of first-tier suppliers has improved, with 48 per cent of brands publishing a list and ten brands — including Chloé and Guess — disclosing these suppliers for the first time. However, just 32 per cent disclose their processing facilities and 12 per cent disclose some raw material suppliers, up just one per cent from the previous year.
“We’re advocating for greater collaboration across the supply chain,” said Williot. “The data speaks for itself: so far, so slow.”
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