Remake held fashion to account for a decade. Its closure raises alarm

Hey there, this week brings news that hits close to home. Remake, the fashion accountability nonprofit founded by Ayesha Barenblat, is closing after ten years. It is the organisation that inspired many of us — journalists, activists, engaged shoppers — to get into this work in the first place.

Below, JD reflects on what the organisation built, the outpouring of response and why the conditions behind this closure should concern anyone who cares about holding the fashion industry to account.

Thanks for reading! Find the full briefing below, made publicly available thanks to the support of our Founding Members. Without our Founding Members, anxiety.eco would not be possible. 

JD and Amy

A decade ago, Ayesha Barenblat was leading design students into garment factories across Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Mexico on immersive trips. In a 2016 interview with NBC News, she said, “I think of Remake as a sort of ‘Peace Corps’ for the fashion industry.”

The premise was, sit with the women who stitch your wardrobe, hear their stories and see the true nature of the work firsthand in a way that fashion education rarely teaches students. But Remake gradually grew to a far more expansive platform for awareness, accountability and direct action.

Barenblat, a Pakistani-American who had spent years inside the system — including at Better Work, a World Bank and ILO partnership — had concluded that insider advocacy alone wasn’t going to cut it. What was needed, she argued, was a people’s movement that could close the distance between the people who wear the clothes and the people who make them.

This week, Remake announced it would shut its doors by the end of this month. In an email to supporters, Barenblat directly addressed the cause. “Over the past two years, funding for labor organizing and climate justice work has declined sharply,” she wrote, “and we’ve felt that impact deeply.” The board had explored restructuring, mergers and new funding models. It concluded that closing with integrity was preferable to compromising the work. And integrity was a defining characteristic of the organisation, which never took money from the brands it held to account.

What that decade produced is a case study in what collective action can achieve. The #PayUp campaign, launched in March 2020 when brands invoked force majeure to cancel completed factory orders, gathered roughly 270,000 signatures and pressured two dozen major companies to reverse cancellations worth an estimated $22 billion. The California Garment Worker Protection Act became law in September 2021, banning piece-rate pay under which workers earned as little as $2.68 an hour. Three thousand ambassadors were trained across 80 countries. And the Fashion Accountability Report scored 52 of the world’s largest brands across 88 metrics and found the average score was 14 out of 150.

Barenblat was clear about the tensions at the centre of the work. “Fundraising is always an ongoing challenge,” she previously said in an interview with a blogger. “We are tackling a wicked and complex problem but find that some foundations believe that shoppers simply do not care and others are more distracted domestically in the US.”

For an organisation that refused money from the industry it scrutinised, the past two years proved fatal. It raises many questions, chief among them, if Remake’s impressive campaigns and global network can’t maintain funding, how can anyone carry this work forward in a sustainable way?

Within hours, Remake’s Instagram post received hundreds of comments from people who traced entire career arcs back to the organisation. The general sentiment across these comments, and posts across other social media networks, was the oft-repeated keyword “life-changing.”

Jemima Elliott, a journalist and climate campaigner, wrote on LinkedIn about discovering #PayUp as a university student stuck at home during COVID in 2020. She went on to lead a successful campaign to ban Shein and other fast fashion retailers from advertising at her students’ union. She described it as “the first time I was part of a movement that achieved massive and tangible wins.”

Carry Somers, founder of Fashion Revolution, acknowledged “a really tough funding landscape” and noted that Remake’s work had “shifted conversations, transparency, mindsets.” 

Rachel Arthur, who works on sustainable fashion at the United Nations Environment Programme, called the closure “a huge loss.” 

One Instagram commenter put it bluntly: “Beyond sad as this will just allow more companies to get away with stuff. Majority of news outlets are already biased/bought out.”

Puja Mj, executive board member of the Slow Fashion Movement and a Remake community organiser in South Asia wrote in a LinkedIn post: “Impact is deeply shaped by funding. When funding declines, it doesn’t just affect budgets — it affects communities, momentum and the scale at which change can happen.”

Remake’s closure arrives at a moment when the watchdogs of corporate accountability, across fashion and well beyond it, are under extraordinary pressure. That is, of course, not by accident. 

Consider the organisations that directly supported the garment workers Barenblat spent a decade trying to connect us with: in Bangladesh, the Awaj Foundation, which represents more than 600,000 garment workers, lost an estimated 25 to 30 per cent of its funding from a single US executive order and was forced to lay off staff and shutter offices. 

The Solidarity Center — the largest American international worker rights organisation, active in garment-producing countries for decades — stripped back its website after USAID funding was frozen. 

These are all linked, and they serve the interests of the rich, the powerful, the authoritarians. These stories are the connective tissue between a $2.68-an-hour wage in Los Angeles and the force majeure clause that tried to make a garment worker in Dhaka eat the cost of a pandemic.

Anyone working in this space knows the hard facts: funding is fickle at the best of times, and the gap between the ultra-rich men at the top of the system and the people doing the essential work is obscene, as I reported in January in the inaugural Ultra Rich List. That wealth gap in fashion — and our consumer culture more broadly — has never been wider. 

But no funding crisis undoes what Remake achieved: 270,000 people moved $22 billion. Design students who visited a factory in Phnom Penh got fast fashion ads banned from their campus. Policies became law. And the data they unveiled does not disappear. 

As Barenblat wrote in her farewell, “the next generation of advocates we trained? They’re just getting started.” 

Collective action works. It also, as this closure makes painfully clear, needs to be paid for.