The clothes you're wearing have travelled a remarkable distance before reaching your wardrobe.

A typical garment may spend months moving through a global network of farms, mills, factories, suppliers, logistics providers and retailers. Raw materials are sourced in one country, processed in another, assembled somewhere else and shipped across continents before arriving in stores. What begins as simple clothing design often passes through dozens of hands before it reaches the customer.

Fashion is a $1.7 trillion industry built on supply chains designed for speed, flexibility and low costs. Those same qualities have helped drive growth and keep prices down, but they can also create vulnerabilities when conditions change. As trade tensions, tariffs, climate impacts and geopolitical uncertainty increase, supply chains that appear highly efficient can become increasingly exposed to disruption.

Environmental impacts often dominate sustainability discussions, but many of the industry's biggest challenges are social: poor working conditions, labour rights abuses, weak worker protections and the lack of meaningful oversight across complex supplier networks. When pressure enters the system, those risks are often borne by the workers with the least power to influence the outcome.

In this week’s episode, Giulia Bottaro discusses what this means for fashion’s future with Áine Clarke, head labour rights in supply chains & investor strategy at the Business and Human Rights Centre.

Their conversation explores why modern fashion supply chains have become increasingly vulnerable, how business models built around speed and flexibility can amplify risk during periods of disruption, and why workers often bear the greatest costs when commercial pressures move through the supply chain.

The discussion also challenges the common assumption that transparency alone is enough. Knowing where risks exist is only the first step: without changes to purchasing practices, stronger worker protections and meaningful accountability, transparency risks becoming little more than a reporting exercise.

As sustainability increasingly becomes a conversation about resilience, this episode asks a fundamental question: who ultimately bears the cost when fashion's supply chains come under pressure?

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