Fashion Revolution Week: Your Supply Chain Questions, Answered
On April 24, 2013, the Rana Plaza building in Dhaka collapsed. It killed 1,138 garment workers — people making clothes for Zara, Walmart, Primark, Mango, Benetton. Brands available in every mall in America. Not in an accident. Not in a fire. In a building that had visible cracks in the walls the morning it fell. Workers saw them and reported them. They were told to go in anyway.
The building didn't fail. The system did.
It is the deadliest garment industry disaster in history — more than ten times the death toll of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York in 1911, which killed 146 workers and finally forced the United States to confront what happens when profit is placed above the people doing the work. A century later, in a different country, the same calculation was made. Go in. Keep working. The clothes need to ship.
Fashion Revolution Week didn't emerge from a meeting room. Carry Somers and Orsola de Castro — two designers who had spent years trying to build ethical fashion brands — watched the rubble being searched for clothing labels so investigators could prove which brands had been produced there. The workers were invisible in the media coverage of the accident. That's when Somers said she knew they needed to build something that wouldn't let the industry forget. Fashion Revolution was born from that moment. Every April, on the anniversary of the collapse, it asks: Who made my clothes? Who made my jewelry?
For a period of time I was the Pacific Northwest lead for Fashion Revolution. I know what this campaign asks of the brands it targets because I was on the other side of it — helping organize the conversations, fielding the questions, watching which brands answered and which ones went quiet.
What I love most about Fashion Revolution Week is the chance to talk openly with the public about the realities of the global supply chain. I lived in China for almost a decade. I've seen the good, the bad, and everything in between. Over the years of participating in this campaign, people have asked me hard questions — about transparency, about the jewelry industry specifically, about what any of it means for the piece they're holding in their hand.
Here are some of the questions I come back to most.
Q: Why is it important for the public to know who makes their products?
From The Stylist Way
It puts the humanity back into the relationship between the buyer and the maker. There's a persistent misconception that "factory made" means machine made. It doesn't. Every step in fashion and jewelry involves people — people with families, with commutes, with rent to pay.
Mindful jewelry — mindful consumption of any kind — starts with asking that question. Not because it makes you a better person, but because the question creates accountability. Brands that know their customers are paying attention make different decisions than brands that know they aren't.
Q: Why do some brands refuse to be transparent?
From The Stylist Way
Their business model depends on it. The economics of fast fashion require externalization of costs — pushing the real price of cheap goods onto workers in other countries and onto local environments that lack the regulatory protection to push back. Wealthy countries get low prices. Poor countries pay with their workers' health and the destruction of their local environment.
There's no business reason to pull back the curtain as long as the supply chain keeps delivering product and nobody is asking. Fashion Revolution Week is one of the few moments when enough people ask at once that brands have to respond. The ones that go quiet are telling you something.
Q: What about the jewelry industry specifically?
From Samjoyy
Jewelry has its own supply chain problems, distinct from clothing. Raw metals and stones are often extracted in regions with weak environmental and human rights protections. Organizations like the Responsible Jewellery Council and the Fairmined Association are working to establish traceability on materials — but it's difficult work in an opaque industry.
My approach was to design the problem out. Astor & Orion doesn't use stones. Every piece is cast from recycled sterling silver or recycled brass — no new mining demand, nothing to trace back through an opaque supply chain. The metal is cast by a partner who holds SMETA 4-Pillar certification, audited on-site by Intertek. Their 2025 audit confirmed 523 workers on site, living wages, zero hours violations, and a workforce that is 61.6% women — 73.1% at the supervisory level.
Q: What can I actually do?
Ask. That's the whole campaign. When a brand says "ethically made" — ask what that means. Ask who audits it. Ask how often. A brand with nothing to hide will answer.
And if you want to go deeper, watch The True Cost — Andrew Morgan's documentary on the human and environmental cost of fast fashion. It follows the supply chain from cotton fields to factory floors to landfills, and it makes the abstraction concrete. Available on Netflix, Peacock, and Amazon. It's 92 minutes and it will change how you think about every piece of clothing and jewelry you own.
The industry changes when enough people ask that brands have no choice but to answer.
Karen Hartman, Founder, Astor & Orion. Updated April 2026.