We still don’t have enough transparency in fashion

Transparency has become another buzzword in fashion over the years, referring to the need for brands to disclose more information around their environmental and social impact. But Fashion Revolution’s latest Fashion Transparency Index shows that the 250 biggest brands in the world still aren’t offering enough transparency – which means they can’t be held accountable for their actions (or indeed, their lack of action).

In fact, brands only scored an average of 24 per cent in the latest Fashion Transparency Index, with a third of brands scoring between 0 and 10 per cent. Even the highly-ranked brands – which this year included H&M, The North Face and Timberland – failed to score above 80 per cent, showing just how much progress is still needed. “Progress is still too slow,” Liv Simpliciano, policy and research manager at Fashion Revolution, tells Vogue. “This continued lack of transparency on issues that are absolutely critical is concerning,”

Of course, a brand offering greater transparency does not automatically mean it is more sustainable, as Fashion Revolution is keen to emphasise. Perhaps not surprisingly, brands are more likely to be transparent about their policies and commitments (where there was an average score of 51 per cent) than their impacts (where the average was 19 per cent). “It’s really important that brands disclose not only their commitments, but how they’re performing on those commitments,” Simpliciano continues.

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Even where targets are disclosed, they often lack specificity. For example, 45 per cent of brands have targets on sustainable materials, but only 37 per cent actually provide information about what they consider a sustainable material to be. Meanwhile, only 29 per cent of brands have published goals to cut carbon emissions across their supply chain that are in line with the Science Based Targets initiative.

When it comes to transparency across the supply chain, the majority of brands are still falling short. Only 48 per cent disclose their first tier suppliers (the factories where the cutting, sewing and finishing of products happens), while 125 of the 250 brands were rated between 0 and 5 per cent for overall traceability. On top of that, a staggering 96 per cent don’t disclose the number of workers who are paid a living wage in their supply chain.

• “There’s no sustainable fashion without fair pay,” Ciara Barry, policy and research co-ordinator at Fashion Revolution, says. “The fact that the [majority] of brands don’t disclose the number of workers in their supply chain that are paid a living wage says to me that they either don’t know how much their workers are being paid, or that they’re not being paid a living wage – because if they were being paid a living wage, why wouldn’t you disclose it?”

While some progress has been made since the index was first launched in 2016 (the average score of the 90 brands that have been included since 2017 is now at 34 per cent), it will likely take legislation for there to be widespread transparency across the fashion industry. The Fashion Act in New York, proposed earlier this year, would require brands to report on energy usage, greenhouse gas emissions, water, plastic use and chemical management, as well as the total volumes of materials produced (the index found that 85 per cent of major brands don’t disclose this) and median wages for workers. Meanwhile, the European Union’s proposed Corporate Sustainability Directive would also require brands to disclose more information moving forward.

For Fashion Revolution, though, transparency is just the base level required from brands, allowing greater scrutiny on their actions. That in turn, they hope, will accelerate change across the industry. “Transparency really is the bare minimum; we should expect brands [to] be honest about their business practices,” Simpliciano comments. “We’d love to have all brands scoring 100 per cent so that we can move on to the impact, to the outcomes,” Barry adds. “Transparency isn’t a silver bullet, but it unlocks all the issues that we want to solve.”