Turn up the transparency. Turn down the volume.
Why is seeing through the looking glass so important in fashion?
″‘You couldn’t have it if you did want it,’ the Queen said. ‘The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday – but never jam to-day.’
‘It must come sometimes to ‘jam to-day,″ Alice objected.
‘No, it can’t,’ said the Queen. ‘It’s jam every other day: to-day isn’t any other day, you know.‘”
Have you noticed that the health app on your phone the section covering your exposure to headphone audio levels?
I frequently ask my kids to look at their exposure, continually and patiently advocating for them to turn on the headphone notifications widget that limits the maximum volume their headphones can reach.
This plea, like many of my “Mummy” demands, is, routinely, ignored.
Which annoys me greatly because:
They have the volume up way too loud most of the time that they have their headphones in; and
They have headphones in, like, always!
To me, it is clearly consequential: loud noise is bad for ears.
To my kids, however, over exposure to loud noise, especially loud noise delivered straight into their ears, has no bearing whatsoever on whether they can hear, today or tomorrow.
They just like loud noise.
Transparency means being able to see through something. It’s often described as a looking glass effect, where light passes through the object and what is behind it can easily be seen.
The looking glass provides a super effective metaphor for describing a concept often “expected” of businesses and government, (of anyone, really, who is taking significant actions and making important decisions that impact a lot of other lives in some way), and that is to have some degree of be transparency over what they do.
Noting that I am not a transparency expert, I say some degree because I think that there are levels of transparency, ie not everything should be completely see through (perhaps national security fits in here).
I’ve come up with four levels of transparency for now (but there could be more).
Closed: minimal transparency where information is controlled and restricted.
Disclosure: where selected information is revealed, perhaps as needed or required.
Communicate: active transparency where information flows back and forth between parties.
Shared: extremely active, featuring full and open access to information and collaborative exchange (I think this level is what transparency experts might refer to as “radical”. Radical, I assume, because it is such a massive departure from what is considered the norm!
Increasingly, fashion brands and businesses are being called upon to to disclose (which is, really, the base level of transparency) their production volumes, meaning the quantity of products they are making, specified by type and time period, ie the number of t-shirts made in the last 12 months?
The Or Foundation is one of the many groups calling for transparency, running a campaign called ‘Speak Volumes’, which asks fashion brands to disclose their annual production volumes.
They Or Foundation, based in Ghana, which, sadly, receives a lot of the world’s wasted fashion, note that this information “should be information that every brand should have available”.
Yet this information is, mostly, not available.
Essentially, we’re all in the dark about exact (or sometimes even any) production numbers.
Fashion Revolution’s 2024, ‘What Fuels Fashion?‘ report, highlights the opaqueness around volume disclosure.
They reviewed 250 of the world’s largest fashion brands and retailers and it found that only 11% of brands disclose how many clothes they make annually.
Most big fashion brands (89%) do not disclose how many clothes they make annually. Alarmingly, nearly half (45%) fail to disclose neither how much they make nor the raw material emissions footprint of what is produced.
This is super worrying given today’s context. A widely quoted statistic, from the very reputable EMF, is this: “over the past 15 years, worldwide clothing production has doubled.”
This statistic is from 2019.
A lot has changed in the past six years; new, ultra-fast players, have entered the scene and there has been a massive increase in fibre production (especially synthetic fibre production).
This leads me to believe that production levels, today, are, most likely, significantly higher than the predictions of 2019.
The volume has been pumped up to the max.
And this should worry all of us.
The most common reason for pursuing transparency is because it’s seen as the tool by which brands can be held to account.
The overwhelming lack of disclosure by brands, however, seems to show that most brands don’t see transparency in the same light.
I wonder if being more specific about the why could help fix the situation we’re currently in (ie the one where disclosures are not being made) or even, ideally, start to see this information as sitting at the level of shared transparency.
Here, then, is my why.
The production number clarifies (helps us see through the window if you really want me to ram home the transparency metaphor) what a business’s impact really is.
This is because the number - no matter how big or small - provides the context to every other piece of sustainability reporting that a business provides.
Knowing the number, then, is not the destination (the end point). Rather, it is the jumping off point. It provides the context by which a brand’s broader sustainability credentials, particularly its claims around what it says it can, and intends to, achieve - can be judged (its ability to meet its targets directly correlates to how much it is making).
Without clarity over volume, knowing - and interrogating - what a brand’s impacts either have been, are or will be across the supply chain can become just a guessing game. And that means that setting targets can, in effect, only ever be a marketing exercise, one that is, highly likely, to be nonsensical, much like the jam rule by the Queen.
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where–” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
“–so long as I get SOMEWHERE,” Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”
Disclosure, though, is only part of the way to there.
There is a place where production numbers correlate to what the carrying capacity of the earth is. Carrying capacity is a term usually used for population and it refers to the maximum population that a given area can sustain (see Science Direct). To make sense of what is meant by sustain, scientists (who are amazing) have already identified limits for the nine biophysical processes that regulate the stability of the earth system (planetary boundaries) and so here, the world - collectively - has to identify what is the maximum number of clothes (from both virgin and non virgin) that can be produced which will keep the world within its safe planetary boundaries. And, I argue anyway, the world should do this by reference to earth system justice: justice between countries, communities and people (intragenerational Justice), justice between generations (intergenerational justice) and justice for interspecies and earth systems stability.
This is not a new idea. Most roadmaps, pathways and/or transitions plans for the world (the most excellent ones at least) talk about the need to halve consumption and production footprints if we are to fix the mess we’re in. These plans recognise that climate or nature targets cannot possibly be achieved if no efforts are being made to right size production levels.
What needs to happen, then, is for work to begin on identifying - for everyone - what is the “right” level.
This is where I almost throw my hands up in the air and/or smack my head on the table in defeat and despair.
In this context, right is synonymous with good because what I’m essentially asking (I think) is what level of production is good for people and planet? However, can “good” be defined, especially given how highly contextual it is. Should all brands, everywhere, be treated equally or is it dependent on the impact a brand has already had or its potential for new impact? Does it depend on what is being made and how? Does it depend on where the making is taking place? Who gets access to what is made, given some in the world already have too much and some have far too little? What happens if prices escalate because of limited supply? Who is that favouring and who is that unfairly penalising?
I don’t know the answers to these questions but I do know that unless disclosures about production numbers are made (as a first step) and brands, businesses, governments and citizens, engage in open conversations around production levels (back to radical transparency), resolving what is safe, just or fair will remain a guess.
Back to noise levels over headphones.
My kids, despite constant nagging by me, believe that their hearing will be ok and that volume control is not needed. Of course, they’re wrong! Excessive volume is not a good thing, for hearing or for fashion.
What could be notifications on volume for fashion that could work? I have some ideas, like:
setting industry standards for the publication of production volumes (as called for by The Or Foundation);
passing legislation requiring brands to disclose their production levels; and
passing a broader suite of legislation that holds brands accountable for all their environmental and social impacts across their supply chains, (extended producer responsibility schemes plays an important role here, as does banning finished products from landfill and/or being dumped elsewhere).
But, to ensure that these controls are not ignored (or switched off) a whole lot of work has to be done to change who businesses should, really, be accountable to. This brings us back to the beginning and the idea that transparency is a tool to hold businesses to account.
We must ask, accountable to whom?
For the most part, businesses see themselves as accountable only to their investors/owners. If that group wants profits to increase (which is usually the case) then volume will, usually, increase as that’s seen as the simplest way to increase profits.
It has been too easy, for too long, for brands to be unaccountable to:
the gazillion or so workers involved in the supply chain;
the people who buy/wear the product; and/or
the planet (which is being trashed in the name of fashion).
Unlike my kids, and their impending hearing loss, which will affect mostly them and is, also, for them anyway, seen as a future them problem, pumping up the volume of clothes production is both a world problem and a now problem.
And that means we (all of us) have no choice but to tackle it (ie TURN IT DOWN).
To address the noise, therefore, we need businesses to become radically transparent, engage in conversations about how they are part of the something bigger - ie, the world!
The world’s hearing depends on businesses (all businesses) openly engaging in conversations about safe planetary boundaries and earth system justice for all.
jb
soundtrack
Three VERY ironic choice today for you to rock out to. (just keep the volume at an appropriate level)
First, the early 90s dance hit, ‘No Limit’ by 2 Unlimited
Second, let’s go back to to ten years before that (over 30 years ago) and dance out to “Push It to the Limit”, a 1983 song by Paul Engemann which featured on the movie Scarface (which, guessing from the video clip, is about trying to take it all).
Third, (because three is always best for a list), we will come back to the future and, in the words of my kids, SLAY! it. Slay is by Eternxlkz, a music producer from Kazakhstan who is “at the forefront of the modern Brazilian Phonk scene”. (I have no idea what that means but this song is awesome).
All of us must SLAY when it comes back to turning down the volume!