066: It's Time to Quit Zara

As the brand turns 50, how can we forget its human rights violations?

When I began attending university in Toronto in 2008, there was a girl who would trot into our 8AM tutorial in what can only be described as bitchy little ankle boots. Fascinated by these shoes she wore, I asked her where they were from. Zara, she replied. The next day I headed to the nearest Zara, the first time I’d ever been to the brand’s stores, and found the bitchy little ankle boots on display as part of the season’s newest arrivals. As someone who couldn’t afford to lose a single subway token, there was absolutely no entertaining those shoes. But from then on, I regularly stopped by Zara, aspiring to one day buy something from there.

The first time I did buy something from Zara was sometime around 2010 or 2011. I had moved to America that summer and worked thankless retail jobs, clearing out piles of clothes customers had strewn around their fitting rooms and picking up clothes they’d knocked off hangers and onto floors. One day, while I was in a Zara at a local mall, I saw a coat I desperately wanted. It was a collarless beige coat with a rough tweed texture and sharp shoulders. I tried it on, and my mother insisted I buy it, I worked so hard, I deserved it. As much as I wanted the coat, I thought of its practicality. It wasn’t particularly warm and I’d only be able to wear it during the fall interlude. Eventually, I bought it. I sized up so that I could wear multiple layers under it to somehow get me through the winter, and when it warmed up, my mother could wear it too. It was a splurge, and I needed to get my money’s worth.

Several months after I bought the coat, which turned out to be a terrible defense against cold snowy days, 30 factories in Brazil where Zara outsourced parts of its manufacturing were accused of having slave-labor working conditions. Worker safety was perilous, a fire extinguisher that had expired in 1998 was found, and Bolivian migrant workers earned $569 a month at the time for working no less than 12 hours a day.¹ The Zara seal broken, I commenced shopping there, particularly during the store’s end-of-season sales. Sweaters, trousers, scarves, I was oblivious to the facts. In a 2015 report, the abuses against Bolivian workers persisted.²

On the 24th of April, 2013, Rana Plaza, a building in the outskirts of Dhaka, Bangladesh, that housed factories responsible for manufacturing for brands such as Mango, Walmart, The Children’s Place, and Zara, collapsed. Its aftermath was horrifying. One of the most devastating images to emerge was that of a woman and man, crushed under the rumble, in a final embrace.³ For days, my grandmother visited the site of the catastrophe, armed with tiffin carriers full of food and water bottles to hand out to grief-stricken strangers. My grandfather dedicated his daily prayers specifically to the victims and their families. Disturbed by the horror of what had happened, I voiced my anger in a small publication for and by South Asian people. Now able to buy things beyond H&M and Forever21, I continued to shop at Zara, labels bearing “Made in Bangladesh”.

In 2016, I got a Big Girl Job which had a business-formal dress code. I hit the Zara near Bryant Park, and picked out two cropped collarless jackets with metal fastenings, one in black and one in navy; a pair of black wide-legged trousers; a grey and black tweed mock-neck top; and a synthetic-soft white shirt with gold buttons. I wore a combination of those pieces on rotation, mixed in with another pair of black trousers, a brown-faux leather skirt, and a few sweaters and shirts, mostly from Zara. That year, more than 40 artists accused Zara of plagiarizing their work.⁴

The year I got my Big Girl Job, I exited it, stunned by toxic corporate culture and my own naivety. Some time later, I made an attempt to complete my university degree (sorry Mum and Dad). I took a class on fashion and sustainability, and while much of the semester was spent listening to representatives from certain troubling brands talk abstractly about their grand plans for their Sustainable Development Goals, it also introduced me to the works of scholars like Naila Kabeer. The more I read and learned about exploitation at the hands of fast fashion, the less I could evade my guilt, the clearer it became that I played a role as perpetrator.

From my readings I learned, for example, that the strangely common belief that people from lower income groups were the biggest fast fashion spenders was untrue. Middle and high income groups love their fashion fast. By this time, I had stopped shopping at Zara. Nothing about giving my money to one of the wealthiest men in the world⁵, a man who amassed wealth at the cost of human life, made sense to me. I was no longer patching together paychecks, and I was financially stable enough to make smarter and more responsible decisions with how I spent my money.

If someone is in a financial position where shopping at Zara is a splurge, there is no shame or judgment in that. I have been in that position. But it is easier on the conscience to demonize a minority group who factor for a nominal piece of the equation, than to look in the mirror. What is difficult to fathom is how people who have the means to buy luxury designer clothes and accessories have the gall to also shop at Zara, and encourage others to do so, or how people of generously comfortable means can partner with a company so totally and completely morally bankrupt. Endless shopping newsletters are littered with affiliate links to Zara “dupes” to recreate one’s impersonal style, with a side of Phoebe Philo and Prada. For the brand’s 50th anniversary this year, over 50 fashion industry heavyweights participated in campaigns to celebrate what I can only imagine are the brand’s historic human rights violations. A link, a campaign, or a collection from influential figures in the fashion and fashion media industries signals that despite all of Zara’s crimes, they continue to co-sign the brand.

Since my first purchase at Zara in my early twenties, garment workers in Turkey attached notes to clothing in Zara stores across Istanbul that read, “I made this item that you’re going to buy, but I didn’t get paid for it!”⁶; Zara sourced materials from China’s state-imposed labour transfer programs using Uyghur forced labor⁷; Zara sourced materials from a farm in India using child laborers⁸; Zara partnered with a cotton producer in Brazil known for human rights violations and the deforestation and destruction of natural habitats⁹; Zara worked with a manufacturer in Pakistan with poor safety regulations, resulting in the deaths of 250 people¹⁰; and Zara has continued its expansion in a place where its government has been accused of committing crimes against humanity¹¹. In this time, Amancio Ortega, founder of Zara parent-company Inditex, has accumulated an estimated net worth of 124.4 billion dollars.

Am I a perfectly ethical and responsible shopper? Not in the least – I assure you, I am the furthest from a sanctimonious high priestess atop her high horse as I write this. Most of what I own can hardly be traced, and the majority of brands are not transparent about how or where sourcing and production takes place. But of the brands I once regularly used to shop, Zara’s crimes have become inescapable, with regular headlines of having been persistently linked to human rights violations. The audacity of this persistence reads entirely like flagrant disregard for the lives of the people who make the items we’re going to buy, as well as for the rules that safeguard those lives.¹²

It took over ten years and countless catastrophes since I first coveted those Zara boots to finally be unable to look away and ignore the facts, to recognize myself as part of the problem. When it was the most I could afford, it made certain things less of an impossibility. From my position of privilege now, one of the simplest things I do to hold fast-fashion behemoths like Zara accountable in protecting and upholding human lives is to continue my divestment, and to encourage others like myself to do the same. I suspect that when it comes to billionaires, money talks, so hit ‘em where it hurts.

1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/andersonantunes/2011/08/17/zara-accused-of-alleged-slave-labor-in-brazil/

2. https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2015/may/12/zara-owner-inditex-fines-brazil-working-conditions-claim

3. https://time.com/3387526/a-final-embrace-the-most-haunting-photograph-from-bangladesh/

4. https://hyperallergic.com/314625/more-than-40-artists-and-designers-accuse-zara-of-plagiarism/

5. https://www.forbes.com/profile/amancio-ortega/

6. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-41981509

7. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/06/substantial-volume-of-clothing-tied-to-uyghur-forced-labour-entering-eu-says-study-china

8. https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/sustainability/india-cotton-child-labour-investigation-zara-hm-amazon-gap/

9. https://www.lemonde.fr/en/environment/article/2024/04/11/zara-and-h-m-s-jeans-linked-to-deforestation-in-brazil-s-cerrado_6668079_114.html

10. https://cleanclothes.org/news/2022/press-release-deadly-safety-hazards-in-pakistani-factories-supplying-hm-ca-bestseller-and-zara

11. https://bdsmovement.net/news/boycott-zara-dressing-apartheid-and-genocide

12. Zara dragged its feet on signing the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh for 12 years after Rana Plaza: https://cleanclothes.org/news/2021/zara-must-not-walk-away-from-safety-agreement-while-workers-remain-at-risk-sewing-its-clothes