Rana Plaza: The Day Fashion Changed

The Cracks Everyone Saw

On 23 April 2013, workers at Rana Plaza — an eight-storey building in Savar, on the edge of Dhaka, Bangladesh — spotted large cracks in the walls. An engineer looked at them and warned that the building wasn't safe. The bank and the shops on the lower floors closed and sent everyone home.

The five garment factories on the upper floors didn't. The next morning, workers were told to go back inside. Some later said managers threatened to hold back a month's pay if they refused. For someone supporting a family on a garment wage, that's not really a choice.

Just before 9 a.m. on 24 April, the power cut out and the building's heavy generators rumbled on. Within about ninety seconds, Rana Plaza collapsed. In the end, 1,134 people died and more than 2,500 were injured. Most of them were young women.

The building had been designed for shops and offices, not for thousands of sewing machines and generators — and extra floors had been added illegally. It remains the deadliest disaster in the history of the garment industry.

What Changed Almost Overnight

As rescuers dug through the rubble, they kept finding clothing labels people recognised — reports at the time linked around 29 Western brands to the factories inside, including Primark, Mango and Benetton. These weren't mystery clothes. They were headed for ordinary shops, the same kinds you'd find in any mall from London to Dubai.

The outrage moved fast. Within weeks, brands and trade unions signed the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh. Unlike earlier voluntary promises, the Accord was legally binding: over 200 brands eventually signed, agreeing to fund independent safety inspections covering roughly 1,600 factories and more than two million workers. Inspectors found and fixed tens of thousands of hazards — blocked fire exits, faulty wiring, cracked columns.

That same year, designers Carry Somers and Orsola de Castro founded Fashion Revolution, a campaign built around one simple question to brands: who made my clothes?

Since then, Fashion Revolution's annual Transparency Index has pushed big brands to publish lists of the factories they use — something almost none of them did before 2013. It turns out a lot can change when the whole world is watching.

What Still Hasn't Changed

Here's the honest part: not everything got fixed.

Compensation for survivors and families was painfully slow. The Rana Plaza Donors Trust Fund, set up with the International Labour Organization, only reached its US$30 million target in June 2015 — more than two years after the collapse, and only after sustained public pressure on brands to pay in.

Wages are still low. Bangladesh raised its minimum wage for garment workers in late 2023 to 12,500 taka a month — roughly US$113 — after protests in which workers argued it still wasn't enough to live on.

Transparency has improved, but it's far from complete. Fashion Revolution's Transparency Index has found, year after year, that most major brands publish less than half the information it asks for, and plenty still won't say exactly where their clothes are made.

And fashion itself has sped up. Ultra-fast online brands now release thousands of new styles a week, which keeps squeezing the factories — and the people — at the bottom of the chain. Safer buildings matter enormously. But a safe building doesn't automatically mean fair pay or reasonable hours.

Why We Remember — and How You Can Join In

Every April, around the anniversary of the collapse, Fashion Revolution runs Fashion Revolution Week in dozens of countries. People post a photo of their clothing label and ask the brand directly: #WhoMadeMyClothes? It sounds small, but it's the same kind of pressure that got the Accord signed and supplier lists published — attention, multiplied.

You can join in from anywhere, including Dubai, where the malls carry the exact same global brands. Flip a label. If it says 'Made in Bangladesh', there's a good chance it passed through the hands of a young woman not much older than you.

Here's what remembering looks like in practice: 1. Take part in Fashion Revolution Week each April — post, email, or simply ask a brand who made your clothes. 2. When you shop, check how a brand treats its workers. The Rewoven app lets you scan a clothing label and see the brand's Labor grade alongside its other scores. 3. Tell someone the Rana Plaza story. Most people have never heard it.

The workers who reported those cracks were ignored. Remembering them is how we make sure nobody gets ignored like that again.