Due diligence is at the heart of the sustainable fashion agenda, and, increasingly, a legal requirement. Theoretically, I’m all for it. In an industry with a history of greeting injustices and scandals with cries of “it was them, not me!” — it’s a particularly welcome antidote. Nevertheless, I’m concerned about interpretation.

Will due diligence requirements push companies to consider their own role in the systemic challenges we’re collectively up against? Or will they emphasize verification and control, subsumed by a broader arsenal of command-and-control, top-down, approaches to sustainable fashion?

What is due diligence?

The OECD defines due diligence as a process through which companies…

Explanations for low wages and precarious livelihoods within the fashion supply chain usually go something like this: factory managers must squeeze every last drop of time out of their workers to hit the low costs and price targets the industry demands. Cue the calls for isolating labor costs from labor rights activists, sustainability executives, and the press alike. The thinking is: if labor costs are ringfenced, we can make sure worker wages are protected during price negotiations between brands and suppliers.

Intuitive? Yes. But an effective route to securing…

As a disillusioned consumer, former garment factory manager, and concerned citizen, I’ve been trying to re-imagine sustainable fashion. What does doing fashion more sustainable really look like?

And the thing I keep come back to is shared risk. The reality is that in an industry where financial risk is not shared, unsustainable behavior like choosing to subcontract to a sweatshop or canceling purchasing orders, make a lot of sense for the individual actors involved. And it’s not because they’re nefarious. It’s because the absence of shared risk makes it exceedingly difficult to do otherwise.

So we can keep auditing. We…

Research has shown that people working in subcontracted facilities often fare worse than people working in larger, more visible, garment factories. But our efforts to try and change this have been led astray by a flawed conceptual understanding of what subcontracting is and why it exists.

So what is subcontracting? Colloquially, it’s a term used exclusively to describe business arrangements between suppliers. For example, let’s say a brand contracts factory A to produce something on their behalf. Only when Factory A engages factory B, for all or part of the production work, is it called subcontracting. …

As a former garment factory manager, it’s my conviction that stories about management-worker relations desperately need some diversifying. Often, this relationship is talked about in terms of a singular narrative: exploited workers and exploitative management. But this narrative doesn’t help us to understand a multi-dimensional and highly contextual relationship. Most likely, it isn’t in the best interest of workers either.

If we’re serious about making the fashion industry more just, we must stop relying on a one-size-fits all explanation for why manager-worker relations can become contentious.

Relying on a singular narrative might help us make sense of a messy and…

Allegations of forced labor in fashion supply chains should always be taken seriously. A recent New York Times report highlights a Transparentem investigation alleging potential forced labor among TAL’s 2,600 migrant workers. TAL is a large manufacturer based in Hong Kong that employs about 26,000 garment workers across 10 factories, two of which are located in Malaysia. But the tone of the New York Times report is inadvertently misleading. At best, it oversimplifies a complex problem, and at worst, it obscures the path forward for effectively preventing forced labor in fashion supply chains.

The allegations

It’s worth recapping the allegations: the investigation’s…

Recent protests around the world speak to the ways white privilege is deeply ingrained in policy, institutions, and economic systems. As many white people seek to educate themselves on how they might have unwittingly perpetuated oppressive systems, so too must the fashion industry pause to re-consider how white privilege has shaped its approach to sustainable fashion.

What implicit racial biases do sustainable fashion advocates have?

I’m a white, female, millennial with Dutch and American parents. About five years ago, I went from a bleeding-heart liberal with a degree in human rights to a garment factory manager in Cambodia. …

Recent reports of modern slavery in the Boohoo supply chain are infuriating. But equally infuriating is how brands, and sometimes sustainability advocates, continue to talk about human rights abuses within the fashion supply chain as if they’re external problems.

When we allow Boohoo to say things like “we’ve terminated the contracts with the non-compliant firms” or “we’re going to do an independent review into our supply chain” or “we have nothing to hide” the subtext is that responsibility for these human rights abuses is located solely with unwieldy suppliers out to make a profit at any cost.

In other words…