The Fashion Transparency Index 2020 has been revealed, showing that across the 250 brands and retailers measured the world’s biggest brands have a long way to go towards transparency.

Produced by Fashion Revolution, the index places H&M as the highest scoring brand this year, followed by C&A, Adidas and Reebok, Esprit and Marks & Spencer tied with Patagonia. Gucci is the highest scoring luxury brand.

The majority of brands and retailers measured lacked transparency on social and environmental issues, with more than half of brands (54 percent) scoring lower than 20 per cent. Despite this, there are fewer low-scoring brands this year compared to last year.

More good news is that 101 out of 250 brands (40 per cent) are publishing their first tier manufacturers, up from 35 per cent in 2019. These are the facilities that do the cutting, sewing and finishing of garments in the final stages of production. 60 out of 250 brands (24 per cent) are publishing some of their processing facilities, these are the sorts of facilities that do ginning and spinning yarn, knitting and weaving fabrics, dyeing and wet processing, leather tanneries, embroidering and embellishing, fabric finishing, dyeing and printing and laundering, and 18 out of 250 brands (7 per cent) are publishing some of their raw material suppliers, up from 5 per cent in 2019. These suppliers are those that provide brands and their manufacturers further down the chain with raw materials such as cotton, wool, viscose, hides, rubber, dyes, metals and so on.

However, brands tend to publish more about their policies than they do about the outcomes, results and progress they have made to address social and environmental issues in their business and supply chain, for example, only 12 brands (5 per cent) report annual, measurable progress towards paying living wages to workers in their supply chains; only 16 per cent of brands publish annual carbon emissions produced within their supply chains — where the highest proportion of carbon is emitted across the lifecycle of a garment.

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