Super Bowl halftime performer Rihanna’s streaming and sales figures have skyrocketed in the wake of the event, but her Savage X Fenty brand has been called out for unsustainable and exploitative business practices.
Renowned for its size and gender inclusivity, diversity of models and pop culture relevance, the lingerie brand’s value has soared to $3 billion since its launch in 2018.
Global fashion advocacy group Remake has reminded fans of Savage X Fenty’s questionable results in their 2022 Fashion Accountability Report, sharing that given the brand’s” continued linear growth trajectory and lack of supply chain transparency, Savage X Fenty may be well on its way to joining the industry’s worst violators of both human rights and planetary boundaries.”
The company scored four out of a possible 150 points across the board, with zero points for traceability, wages and wellbeing, commercial practices, raw materials and environmental justice.
All four points were earned for their governance, which put them on par with FashionNova, Primark, Boohoo Group and ASOS.
Remake claims the company “blatantly disregards industry standards when it comes to social and environmental disclosures,” with a mere mention on their website that products are “imported”.
“Alarmingly,” they continue, “Savage X Fenty even lacks a Supplier Code of Conduct to define guidelines for assessing factories’ compliance with international labour standards, especially in regards to workers’ health and safety.”
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The brand also relies heavily on the use of oil-based synthetic materials, Remake found, and although it offers a small collection of items made with REPREVE recycled fibres, it has no clear targets for increasing its use of less ecologically damaging materials.
The Fashion Accountability Report, which examined and scored the practices of 58 global fashion retailers, found that last year was a tale of two opposing truths in fashion: “a glimmer of systemic change amidst a prevailing flood of harmful industry practices.”
A prime example of this, the report notes, was Boohoo’s launch of a “sustainable” collection with Kourtney Kardashian Baker, while the company was being investigated by the US government for forced labour, and greenwashing by the UK government.
