We celebrate the difference

Dear reader, have you ever wondered what the lives of people who made your clothes look like? Do you always know the materials that are used to make your clothes and the abused elements of nature that led to them?

Here’s a date you should memorize: The 24th of April 2013. This date marks the anniversary of the fourth largest industrial disaster in history, the Rana Plaza building collapse in Bangladesh. The building was used to house several garment factories, employing around 5,000 people who were manufacturing clothing for some of the biggest global fashion brands. The disaster killed Over 1,100 people and injured another 2,500. The majority of victims were young women. This event generated huge wrath from activists, organizations that led to a series of more than 1,800 physical events hosted around the world in shops and studios, schools, and universities, coffee shops, and community hubs.

Fashion Revolution was created on April the 24th of 2014. It is almost 7 years old and already the world’s largest fashion activism movement, led by two co-founders Carry Somers & Orsola De Castro in the UK.

Each year on the Rana Plaza commemoration date, the FASHION REVOLUTION DAY is celebrated in over 130 countries. It is the combination of many actors that contribute to the fashion industry from designers, academics, writers, business leaders to policymakers, brands, retailers, marketers, producers, makers, workers, trade unions, and fashion lovers.

They are the industry, and the public. The best of world citizens. 

Fashion Revolution works all year long to campaign for a clean, safe, fair, transparent, and accountable fashion industry.

Their work includes intensive research, educational programs, collaborations with diverse platforms and organizations for advocacy. One of their main goals is to push for greater transparency through investigative research, inspiring informative content, and creative event. They aim for a global fashion industry that conserves & restores the environment and values people over growth and profit. Fashion Revolution works to make fashion’s flaws understood by people around the globe every day, through their social media channels, their free online course, and the research on fashion transparency.

They believe transparency is the first step to transforming the industry and to make a shift in the relationships between brands and suppliers to make the rights of people, and the rights of nature more powerful wherever decisions are being made.

In their annual Fashion Transparency Index, they review, rank the biggest global fashion, and apparel brands and retailers according to how much information they disclose about their suppliers, supply chain policies and practices, and social and environmental impact, and they publish the results so brands can be held accountable.

It is also a non-profitable charity that continues to strive only with the help of grants and donations.

Fashion Revolution week happens every year in the week surrounding the 24th of April ( from 19th to 25th this year)  to bring people together around the world to amplify the bigger message, to make their voices heard, and uproot the unbalanced system. They advocate for a structural change in the fashion industry that can lift garment workers from poverty while providing them with decent and dignified livelihoods or It can be the cause to conserve and restore the state of our abused planet.

Fashion Revolution Week is a source of joy, creativity, and expression for individuals and communities that lets them be involved through a series of physical and digital events from exhibitions, film screenings, conferences, interviews, workshops, and many educational activities.

All of this is in motion to spread awareness and awake consumers to what’s happening behind the scenes, in the lives of the makers of those clothes. And That’s how their hashtags went viral:

#WhoMadeMyClothes encourages brands to disclose their suppliers to demand that they give their workers a voice and tell their stories.

They are asking for solutions to the issues that disproportionately impact women and abuse their human rights at the workplace.

#WhatsInMyClothes To address The transparency gap to environmental impact beyond the clothing label.

For Fashion Revolution Week 2021, they’ve partnered with a group of leading organizations that work across the interconnections of human rights and the rights of nature where they aim to align their forces to amplify unheard voices, widen community participation, encourage social discourse and hold the industry accountable.

The Transparency report is a way to know the people involved in fashion production all along the supply chain, to understand every substance and material in any given fashion product, alongside its impact on human rights and nature.

The Tunisian initiative officially started in April 2015 in Sfax by launching an educational action around the values ​​of sustainable fashion for young children from 8 to 15 years old. And since 2016 they’ve been working with their partner IZEM to develop Sustainable Fashion in Tunisia using different media, such as “Workshop Fashion Upcycling” & “Fashion Contest Sustainable” education to meet everyone’s needs, avoiding wasting resources, to make it possible to adapt to climate change and ensuring that future generations will follow the lead.

Their educational actions are geared towards Fashion schools in collaboration with the textile & clothing industries (DEMCO, DND Confection, SITEX, SARTEX).

In Fashion Revolution week of 2019, the DEMCO Group provided the unit with trainers, and a group of fashion BTS trainees from the Sectoral Training Center in Clothing (CSFH) with a series of workshops revolving around textile, paper, wood, and aluminum waste management and their solar energy project.

On the other hand, there are regional teams spread across Tunisia (Sfax, Monastir) that you can join or create your own in a region where it has not yet been created.

So this April and every day we ask you to join us and the rest of the revolutionists around the world to raise our voices and hold corporations accountable for their abuse of workers and natural resources. Join the movement for a more transparent industry, to make a fairer world.