The fashion industry and the need for transparency

Along the banks of the great Magehi river grew the phuti karpas, a rare variety of cotton that between the 17th and 18th centuries made Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, also the home of one of the most sought-after fabrics on the planet, Dhaka muslin. Along other banks, those of the small Buriganga river, the children of contemporary Dhaka play with rubbish in the water made black and mephitic by spills from the textile industries that work for fast and ultra-fast fashion, saving on everything they can, including wages and environmental protection obligations, to attract brand orders.

If 300 years ago ships loaded with muslin, which even Marie Antoinette used to wear, left Bangladesh, a flourishing trade blocked by the proliferation of looms in Great Britain, for the last thirty years the country has based its economy on the manufacture of low-cost clothing, of which it is now the second largest producer after China. The sense of transition from muslin to T-shirts, however, passes through the protests and riots that have been animating the Dhaka factories themselves for months, led by workers fed up with working in miserable conditions and for miserable wages.

Another type of cotton, from the Chinese region of Xinjiang, is the subject of a boycott by entire markets, such as those in Europe and the United States, because it is grown by the Uighurs, a Muslim minority that the Beijing government is accused of persecuting and forcing into work not very different, if not for context, from that of the textile workers in Dhaka. However, it is not necessary to go that far to reveal the most odious face of the contemporary fashion industry, revealed by denunciations, reports and enquiries: according to the NGO Global Initiative against Transational Organised Crime, for example, intolerable working conditions are also found in the factories of North Macedonia and Albania, and to narrow the lens even further, last year the court of Milan launched an inquiry, still underway, into the conditions of the workers of some contract manufacturers involving famous brands.

British journalist Tansy E. Hoskins has made a very precise diagnosis of these evils in writing The Book of Anti-Capitalist Fashion, recognising their origins in an unregulated industrialisation of the industry and determined by the spasmodic pursuit of profit. Without hiding his Marxist leanings - the book's subtitle is "between Karl Lagerfeld and Karl Marx" - Hoskins catalogues and argues how the distortions of capitalism have determined those of fashion since its inception, with interesting parallels between Dhaka, still, and New York: in today's strikes in Bangladesh echo those that involved 15,000 people in New York in 1909, and in the collapse of Rana Plaza in 2013, which claimed the lives of thousands of workers crammed into total precarity, the fire that killed 146 workers in a shirt factory in Manhattan in 1911, where the doors had been barred to prevent union protests.

One cannot but agree with Hoskins also when he states that the historical link between product, process and producer has vanished, with harmful consequences for workers but also for consumers, who are unaware of the real cost of what they buy. The issue of the relationship between price and value is, moreover, one of the most debated topics in the fashion and luxury industry today: if it is now clear that the low, if not rock-bottom, prices offast fashion are possible thanks to savage cost-cutting in the supply chain, otherwise blameworthy are also certain luxury price increases when generated by mere marketing strategies and not by an actual higher quality of the product and its process.