The global fashion industry is complicit in Gaza. BDS can force a reckoning

I first learnt about Palestine via an unusual route–through the Germany based, multinational sportswear corporation, Puma. I have a video series on Instagram called Recipe For Disaster where I “cook up” corporations for their environmental degradation, worker rights abuses and greenwashing.

Big Fashion produces as many as 150 billion garments and 22 billion pairs of shoes annually. This overproduction is a result of exploitative supply chains that are built on colonial pathways, made possible by forced labour and extraction of the Earth’s precious resources.

The only people benefitting from this oversupply are a select few billionaires who run multinational fashion conglomerates—and the term “benefit” is subjective, as you can’t hoard billions on a dead planet.

In May 2023, I posted a video about Puma, calling out their greenwashing for their Voices Of A Regeneration marketing campaign, which was part of the company’s mission to learn about the people “most impacted” by climate breakdown. Instead of amplifying the demands of communities already facing the harshest impacts of global boiling (like their garment makers, for example), they paid influencers – who just so happened to be from their core consumer regions.

I mentioned Puma’s complicity in the ongoing occupation of Palestine, as the brand was the main international sponsor of the Israel Football Association (IFA) which has teams on illegal settlements in occupied Palestine. This video was - to my shame - the first time I had mentioned Palestine on my Instagram channel. Perhaps naively, I didn’t expect the backlash that I received.

As one commenter proclaimed that Israel is “an independent country with the most humanized military in the world” another said: “you should stay at your content! “Fashion” and not “politics”.

Unravelling the threads of occupation

Up until this point, my “politics” had called on global brands to end their use of forced labour and abhorrent working conditions. I had pushed for fair living wages and supported worker unions. I had called for an end to overproduction with a view to protect our Earth. To my Zionist followers, these sorts of politics had been acceptable, but they drew the line at Israel’s illegal settlements and ongoing occupation.

I began to tug at the thread of the Palestinian textile industry and started to unravel a much larger piece of cloth. It is thought that the origins of the life-saving gauze made from natural fibres and used for wound dressings can be traced back to Gaza – where up until very recently, the textile industry was once one of the most important economies.

As with other colonial nations like the UK, Germany and the US, Israel outsourced much of their garment production to Palestine, where labour was ten times cheaper, and workers had little or no power to ask for better wages and improved working conditions.

I started to learn from Palestinian researchers whose research shows how Israeli designers have appropriated Palestinian Tatreez - an Indigenous form of embroidery/weaving and storytelling.

I also interviewed Hirbawi– one of the last remaining Keffiyeh factories in Palestine to learn about this precious symbol of resistance, and how it had been appropriated by fast fashion brands in the 2010s when drunk rockstars would be seen wearing them whilst falling out of London nightclubs.

And the threads to occupation continue to unravel.

Currently, a grassroots campaign has exposed how Zalando made their Muslim workers feel unsafe after October 7 and so called “sustainable” brands like Organic Basics is owned by a company with sites in the occupied West Bank.

Nol Collective, an ethical brand creating beautiful clothes in Palestine has been raising awareness about the political links between fashion and politics since its inception. The brand constantly educates its community on the difficulty of moving fabrics through checkpoints and shipping parcels internationally, all while trying to support local craftspeople, embroiders, dyers and tailors.

BDS works

Palestinian sportspeople have been relentless in their struggle against Puma, and led the global boycott movement efforts against the brand. After five years of targeted offline actions, online pressure and campaigning, Puma ended their sponsorship of the IFA, marking a successful yet bittersweet campaign by the Palestinian led BDS movement - which has just marked its twentieth anniversary.

In fact, when I participated in beach clean-ups in Accra, Ghana, many of us noticed a vast uptick in the number of Puma tags found polluting the waste steam. I have no doubt that this was a result of the boycott campaign, and that the well intentioned folks in countries like the UK - which is one of the largest garment exporters to Ghana  - were donating their Puma clothes.

As the genocide continues, US brand Reebok is the latest global sportswear giant to sponsor the IFA.

As of July 25, the BDS movement has called for a global boycott of Spanish fast fashion brand ZARA because it is profiting from and helping normalise Israel’s occupation, apartheid and genocide against Palestinians. As we collectively experience extraordinary levels of rage and heartbreak at Israel's starvation of Gaza, it’s vital that we channel our grief into strategic, targeted boycotts like these against ZARA and Reebok.      

This is a call to throw out your existing ZARA clothes. Instead, people should continue to wear them. Zara’s oversupply is a key contributor to the global textile waste crisis, causing a humanitarian disaster for frontline communities.

For those worried about the ZARA and Reebok products they already own, consider finding creative ways to upcycle them and cover the branding.

From the soil that grows the fibres, to the fossil fuels that power the factories, to the hands of workers under oppressive regimes who sew the seams, to the ships that transport of products, to the influencers who use affiliate links to sell you clothes, to the “recycling” boxes that collect our clothing donations, to the exporters who profit from excess, to the women who carry 55kg of used clothing bales on their heads in Accra, to the beaches where clothing tentacles combine with the sand, destroying precious ecosystems and the livelihoods of local fishermen: Fashion is deeply political. And we cannot let the Zionist project use selective erasure to remove Palestinians from the fashion justice movement.

Venetia La Manna is a fair fashion campaigner, content creator and TEDx speaker. Venetia uses social media to hold multinational corporations accountable for their unethical practices, human rights abuses and greenwashing. She presented a documentary called 'The Fast Furniture Fix' for BBC Radio 4, and was featured in the Channel 4 documentary 'Inside The Shein Machine'. Her work has been featured in Vogue and The Guardian and she has written for Atmos and The Independent. In 2024 she was a judge for the inaugural Women’s Prize For Non-Fiction.

Follow Venetia on Instagram: @venetialamanna

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.