Why we know everything and change nothing

I thought I understood the industry; its culture, its quality and its lack thereof. I knew the ateliers in Italy where you would discuss the quality of an espresso while standing next to an ironing machine that shaped a Prada blazer in twelve minutes. I knew the production sites in Belgium where the quality of the product and that of the people who made it could be mentioned in the same breath. I knew the working conditions within the production of high-end designerwear, in the world called Europe.

Years later, I watched “Blood, Sweat and T-shirts”. The Dutch tv-series follows six young people with a passion for clothing as they are introduced to garment production in India. What made the series so unsettling was its structure. The viewer goes through the exact same process as the participants, from openness to discomfort to horror. That series made everything I thought I knew collapse like a house of cards. After years as a fashion professional on all sides of the table—in factories, ateliers and classrooms as a developer, designer and lecturer—I was blown away by the discovery of a world behind the one I knew.

The first factory looks more or less as you would expect: organised, perhaps a little messier, functional, but certainly not what you would fear from a sweatshop. That is precisely the trap. The first factory immediately activates “confirmation bias”: the brain recognises what it already knows, draws a parallel with the places it trusts and concludes: you see, it is not so bad. Then comes the second factory. Less light, longer days, younger faces. This is where the discomfort begins. A tempting thought follows: these people have jobs, they support families, who are you to judge? This thought feels like cultural sensitivity. That is precisely why it is so dangerous. It is an emergency exit that keeps you exactly where you were. Only then do we arrive at location three, in the third factory. This is a place that exists because the first factory cannot handle the demand for cheap ready-to-wear, and the second still finds production costs too high for our insatiable hunger for more, and cheaper, and cheaper still. The third factory is a place you would normally never see. Here the question becomes unbearable: not whether you are allowed to have an opinion, but how it is possible that you did not know for so long. I remember the image of a sleeping teenager—or even younger—next to a machine, surrounded by dust and grime.

Confirmation bias is not a personal failing. It is a cognitive mechanism that the system knows and uses. The first factory is not reassuring by chance; it is the face the industry presents precisely because it knows how the brain works. That image begins to falter in factory two.

Disaster that changed nothing

Rana Plaza. On April 24, 2013, a factory building in Savar, Bangladesh, collapsed. More than 1,100 people died. Cracks had been discovered the day before. Engineers advised evacuation. The workers were sent inside anyway, those who did not work lost their day’s wages. There were outraged statements, sustainability reports and compensation funds. What happened after that? The industry simply continued to grow. Research from 2022 shows that French imports from Bangladesh only increased after the disaster.

Psychologist Paul Slovic called this the collapse of compassion in 2007: human empathy never scales with the number of victims. 1,100 deaths is a statistic. One face moves us. More paralyses us. That is not a moral failing. It is how the brain works. It is precisely this trait that made us forget Rana Plaza so quickly.

There is a place in northern Chile where more than 60,000 tonnes of Western clothing goes each year. Polyester, nylon, all fibres that remain in the soil for up to two hundred years. This mountain is invisible to the consumer who clicked ‘order’ four times today. Shein produces between 2,000 and 10,000 new garments per day, using an algorithm that monitors social media and determines what is made in real time. H&M launched its Conscious Collection in 2019. In 2022, the Changing Markets Foundation concluded that more than 60 percent of H&M’s sustainability claims were unfounded or demonstrably false. The Conscious Collection still exists.

Here, the class issue plays its underestimated role. People with higher incomes generate an average of 76 percent more clothing waste than people with lower incomes, according to research from Boston University in 2022. Yet, the question of blame in the sustainability debate is systematically placed on those who can change the least. The woman who buys from Primark has no choice. The woman who buys from a sustainable brand does have a choice, and she buys more.

The philosopher Charles Mills described this in 1997 as structured ignorance: not the lack of information, but the production of ‘not-knowing’ as an institutional system. In the fashion industry, this invisibility is architectural. Production is geographically distant. The supply chain is opaque by design, not by clumsiness. Greenwashing simulates transparency while the structural invisibility remains intact.

That system has an ally in our minds. John Jost, a professor at New York University, described in his system justification theory in 2004 how people tend to defend the system they live in, not despite its disadvantages, but partly because of them. Justifying the system provides cognitive peace. Questioning it costs energy, evokes guilt and requires you to face your own position within it. The brain, where it can, chooses peace.

Resistance begins with the refusal to not know when you can know. The refusal to confuse moral hesitation with sensitivity. The refusal to accept structured ignorance as an excuse.

Ignorance is bliss, said Thomas Gray in 1742. He was right. It is wonderful, until it is not.