The Imperative of Equal Partnership for Sustainable Fashion

The fashion industry’s focus on transparency as an answer to our sustainability woes encourages a culture of control over equal partnership. This critique naturally positions equal partnership as the “good” option, and it is tempting to take the value of equal partnership as self-evident. It’s a phrase comprised of words we instinctively think of as good and use regularly in an aspirational way. But why equal partnership would be good for the fashion industry demands intentional exploration.

For me, fear is the starting point of this exploration. Being a garment factory manager in Cambodia enriched my life immeasurably — I’m indebted to my former colleagues for expanding and deepening my world view. But it also traumatized me. Every morning I would wake up, prepare my thermos of tea, and hop on my scooter for forty minutes to get to work — breathing in toxic fumes and navigating traffic coming at me from 360 degrees. Fear was the predominant feeling. Fear of having a traffic accident in a country with a dearth of qualified doctors and health facilities, fear that one of the many massive construction cranes dangling over the road would drop its load, but most of all, fear of what awaited me in my inbox.

The fear of my inbox stemmed from dealing with customers (brands) who didn’t understand the consequences of their actions on my colleagues and me. For example, the difficult decisions we would have to make as the result of a cavalier change to an Excel spreadsheet, the wild goose chase of trying to land an order, and the havoc a “small” change could wreak on production plans. When I first started managing production facilities, I approached these problems with determination and derived satisfaction from creative problem solving. But as the years wore on, satisfaction turned to weariness. The rules weren’t fair; the game was rigged.

At an inter-industry event back in June, I found myself far from my daily reality at a swanky rooftop bar in Barcelona chatting with other young professionals who mostly worked for brands. Between sips of cava, an email alert popped…

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