“Who made my clothes?” How transparency apps bring politics to cultural fields

The controversial nature of transparency

Ideally, transparency fosters accountability and democratic participation in complex governing systems to their stakeholders, whether these are citizens, consumers, employees, or others (Birchall, 2014; Habermas, 1989; Hood and Heald, 2006; Heimstädt, 2017). While this ideal has its roots in Enlightenment thought and the emergence of modernity, the term “transparency” recently regained popularity (Teurlings and Stauff, 2014; Werron, 2014). Since digitalization has made the production and disclosure of information easier, globalized production and supply chain malpractices have increased the demand for information disclosure. Transparency accordingly serves as a frame to legitimize products (Smith Maguire, 2018). As governments and social movements press for transparency from algorithmic systems to supply chains, transparency is emerging as a “simple solution to the complex problems” of late-stage capitalism (Birchall, 2014).

Yet a range of literature describes the shortcomings in the underlying conceptual and practical assumptions of transparency (see Ananny and Crawford, 2018; Birchall 2014, 2021). Two critiques are relevant here. First, as Teurlings and Stauff (2014) argue, transparency as an ideal of modernity is “necessarily failing” since Enlightenment thought that demanded the disclosure of the world’s “hidden machinery” simultaneously led to modern society’s ever-increasing complexity. The ideal of transparency can thus never be reached and every form of transparency is necessarily a mediated form that discloses some information at the expense of other information. Secondly, the transparency ideal presumes that citizens and other stakeholders can process and interpret large amounts of information stemming from complex systems, a situation akin to a “data tsunami” (Birchall, 2014: 78). In doing so, transparency enables a neoliberal model of agency. As Ananny and Crawford argue, “the imagined marketplaces of total transparency have what economists would call perfect information, rational decision-making capabilities, and fully consenting participants,” a “persistent fiction” (2018: 980).

Teurlings and Stauff (2014) highlighted the mediated nature of transparency, but the literature so far has not studied how transparency is mediated in practice in digitalized cultural consumption. Let’s therefore turn to a category of apps which I propose to call transparency apps.

Introducing transparency apps

Transparency apps aim to make supply chain information visible to consumers and producers. They are developed as an answer to structural political demands for transparency from activists and legislatures As such, transparency apps mediate transparency between consumers and producers.

Building on Callon (2007), scholars have previously argued that apps can be seen as digitalized market devices “that intervene in the constructions of markets” (Hansson, 2017; Muniesa et al., 2007). These digital market devices shape markets, (re)frame market relations between consumers and producers and “qualify” market objects (Cochoy et al., 2017). An important genre of those apps are so called “ethical consumption apps” (Fuentes and Sörum, 2019; Hansson, 2017; Humphery and Jordan, 2018; Sorum, 2020; Soutjis, 2020). Hansson (2017) argues that ethical consumption apps reframe market relations by qualifying products as “ethical” and inscribing consumers as change agents. Similarly, Sorum (2020) argues that ethical consumption apps should be seen as market innovations that potentially reconfigure consumer agency, but often fail out of consumer skepticism. Similarly, Humphery and Jordan (2018) argue that ethical consumption apps fail to enable true critical consumption. Instead, they reduce consumers to passive “clicktivists” that order ethically virtuous goods to fulfill their individual moral duty: “a largely individualized and gestural politics” (Humphery and Jordan, 2018: 528).

Transparency apps share some characteristics with ethical consumption apps such as their ratings of products and brands. Yet they are different. While ethical consumption apps fulfill an ethical individual need, transparency apps generally implement the political institutional solution of transparency. They are often the result of political demands and activism. Accordingly, transparency apps aim to change a cultural industry with a substantial material impact. They thus make a specific structural political intervention in a cultural field. Transparency apps thus carry implications for both cultural consumers and producers. While the apps enable consumers to base their cultural consumption on supply chain information, cultural producers must consider the symbolic power of these apps to reframe their products.

Because they are different from ethical consumption apps, transparency apps imply different research approaches and questions. Stemming from a political fight for transparency, these apps by definition make a political intervention. By implication, it is not enough to focus on political potential or shortcoming as the literature on ethical consumption apps has done (Humphery and Jordan, 2018). Rather, we should focus on the politics they do introduce and afford in cultural fields. And because transparency apps are situated between cultural producers and consumers, I approach them not as market devices but as cultural intermediaries. Fashion as a field with an opaque supply chain and strong reliance on intermediaries is ideally suited to study the political affordances of transparency apps.

Cultural intermediaries in fashion

Cultural intermediaries are situated between producers and consumers. They consecrate and legitimate new trends and provide anchors of stability and certainty amid a constant output of cultural products (Bourdieu, 1984; Smith Maguire and Matthews, 2014). Drawing on authority and expertise, cultural intermediaries frame new trends within established conventions and previous trends (Smith Maguire and Matthews, 2014). They usually reconcile commercial and aesthetic logics of culture (Cronin and Edwards, 2021). These legitimation processes shape taste hierarchies and influences how consumers engage with products (Childress et al., 2021; Foster, 2022). Intermediation is found in roles from bar tenders (Ocejo, 2017) to acquisition editors (Childress, 2012) and literary critics (Chong, 2020).

In fashion, intermediaries like magazines and critics provide meaning and stability to the industry’s continuous stream of novel trends (Kawamura, 2018). If fashion is an “unplanned process of recurrent change against a backdrop of order” (Aspers and Godart, 2013: 185), intermediaries relate the recurrent change to the “backdrop of order” of established fashion conventions. In fashion’s “aesthetic economy” (Entwistle, 2009), cultural intermediaries navigate and integrate aesthetic and commercial considerations to frame the value of fashion products (Crane, 2019). They can be found in various points of the field between producers and consumers from fashion critics (Van de Peer, 2023) to influencers (Colucci and Pedroni, 2021) and apps like the transparency apps under study here.

In the past decades, digitalization and mediatization have transformed the fashion field (Rocamora, 2017). But the seemingly ephemeral digitalized aspects of fashion obfuscate the underlying globalized material supply chains and their ecological footprints. The material production of fashion is extremely opaque. Brands work with many subcontractors that in turn work with subcontractors themselves. As a result, brands often do not know their full supply chain and as the exact ecological impact of fashion production is notoriously difficult to assess for brands, consumers, and governments (Richards, 2021).

This has opened the field to scrutiny from critical consumers and activists like Fashion Revolution or the Clean Clothes Campaign (Balsiger, 2016). Similarly, lawmakers in Western countries have introduced legislation, such as the German Supply Chain Law or the New York State Fashion Sustainability and Social Act making brands accountable for human rights and ecological abuses throughout their supply chain. Meanwhile consultancy reports and fashion media discuss the need for a cultural change in the mindset of consumers and producers to dial down the speed of fashion and reduce its ecological impact (Thorbeck, 2022 McKinsey and Business of Fashion, 2022; Thorbeck, 2022). Transparency apps thus represent a promising solution for both issues. They can unveil supply chain information and as cultural intermediaries instill the cultural change in a form familiar to the digitalized fashion field (de Perthuis and Findlay, 2019; Rocamora, 2017). But as Teurlings and Stauff (2014) argue, transparency is always politically charged, and this article therefore looks at the politics of transparency.

Ecological and progressive values

The interface and language within the apps reproduce eco-progressive values which are in turn embedded in broader ideologies of consumer rights on the one hand and self-optimization on the other hand.

In Retraced, the eco-progressive values are reflected in badges attached to individual products. Users can access these by pressing the “badges” symbol after scanning a product. Products acquire badges for ecological and socially responsible characteristics, including “social engagement” and “climate friendly.” The app offers explanation on the badges, such as “actively engages in projects to have a positive impact in communities and societies” and includes certifications as proof. However, the app does not explain why the user should care about these issues (see Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

Product badges in Retraced.

Retraced not only institutes these values towards consumers but also to producers of fashion (which they call “the customer”). As an employee argued, onboarding sessions with brands are important moments to get brands aligned with Retraced’s approach to sustainability:

“[W]e started working with big corporations that haven't done the work yet, and they might have different values and different views on sustainability. (…) If we want to generate impact, we need to help them. And the only solution to that is dialogue (…). So, in the onboarding sessions, we communicate our values. We say what sustainability is for us. It's collaboration and respect towards planet and society.”

Without agreement, brands cannot work with Retraced and are denied access to consumers through the app. The app thus reframes not only consumption but also production in ecological-progressive terms.

Meanwhile, GOY focuses on three issues within fashion production: animals (“the use of fur, angora, down feather, mulesing practices, leather”), planet (“resource use and disposal, energy use and carbon emissions, impacts on water, chemical use and disposal”), and people (“practices on child labour, forced labour, worker safety, freedom of association, payment of a living wage”). The app prioritizes these themes over other political themes that are pertinent to fashion, such as the industry's struggles with diversity or stimulation of overconsumption through marketing campaigns.

The GOY app describes the core issues superficially, with just two sentences of explanation per issue. This can be accessed through a submenu, “How We Rate Brands” of the profile menu. This is not a menu that the user would likely interact with in everyday use of the app. The app thereby “discourages” (cf. Davis and Chouinard, 2016) the user from accessing this information by providing a barrier between the user and the information. GOY offers more comprehensive information on these issues externally on their website, requiring users to leave the app.

Renoon covers similar political themes. Upon first launch, the app demands the user to sign up for an account and select “topics for impact” against which the app rates products by attaching badges to products (see Figures 2 and 3). These are 36 issues categorized in five themes. The themes are “environmental protection,” “human wellbeing,” “animal ethics,” “innovation and technology,” and “modern consumption.” The app provides no explanation of these topics or their importance. Renoon’s “topics for impact” go beyond what happens in the manufacturing supply chain, as it also includes issues that pertain to company governance, such as “Black owned business” or “Supports communities.”

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Figure 2.

“Topics for impact” in Renoon.

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Figure 3.

“Topics for impact” attached as badges to product page in Renoon.

But where do these eco-progressive values come from? The fact that none of the apps educate users on why these values are important suggests these apps take their relevance for consumers for granted. Ethical fashion campaigns already made eco-progressive issues relevant long before transparency apps launched (Balsiger, 2014). As Balsiger (2016) argued, movements like the Clean Clothes Campaign and their interactions with large fashion companies led to environmental and labor standards, certifications, and regulation schemes. Transparency apps build on this previous social movement work and their decades-long political contestation of fashion’s supply chains. This also explains why more recent issues like overconsumption do not feature prominently in the apps. The apps’ contribution is to make the track record of brands on more traditional eco-progressive issues digitally insightful beyond dedicated ethical fashion campaigns to a new audience of consumers. Doing so, transparency apps give these rather technical standards more symbolic power in the cultural field through the introduction of badges and other symbols signifying value.

Unlike Retraced, Renoon, and GOY afford users to personally set their preferences for each political value. At first sight, this suggests that these apps do not offer coherent broad ideologies as much as a set of loosely related values. These values are, however, embedded in two deeper ideologies in Renoon and GOY discussed next.

Ideologies of consumer rights and self-optimization

Launching GOY, users are confronted by a simple interface with a search bar and some editorial articles. Pressing the search bar leads to an empty screen with room for the user to input a brand which then leads to the rating page (see Figure 4). The app offers no recommended brands. This set-up encourages users to go search for information purposefully on the app. The “browse by category” button allows users to browse by category of clothing, such as “activewear” or “denim,” and then suggests some brands per category. However, since the launch screen provides two buttons for users to search and just one to browse by category, the app encourages users to purposefully seek out information on a brand rather than browse freely.

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Figure 4.

Home screen and brand page in Good On You.

This reflects a deeper view of fashion consumers as market actors in search of information, reflecting Ananny and Crawford (2018) comment about transparency advocates' neoliberal assumptions. The GOY founder expressed that the app is built from the idea that consumers have a right to know more about the production of fashion while producers have the obligation to supply this information:

“The consumer has a right to know how the products they buy impact on the issues that they care about. (…) And that right means that other people, particularly producers have an obligation to be transparent and accurate about what they're doing that impacts on sustainability. And if they don't publish any information, the producer will be awarded the lowest score”

This clearly reflects the fact that GOY was developed by former consumer rights activists. To implement these rights, GOY penalizes producers that do not fulfill the values of animals, people, and planet or provide accurate information. This ideology extends beyond consumption as it challenged producers’ approach to fashion production, according to the GOY founder:

“They respond immediately in the short term about fixing how they're telling consumers what they actually do and in the long term, they investigate ways that they could address some of the [production] issues so they can look better”

At first, brands’ initial stressed reactions led the company to publish advice on how to produce sustainably and communicate honestly. GOY responds to brands' requests for advice on how they could do better. ¹ Here we see that transparency apps not only impact consumption but also production practices.

For Renoon, the political values in the app are embedded within an ideology of self-optimization. This becomes apparent through the app’s functionalities and overall narrative. Renoon allows users to set additional goals for the year 2022 (see Figure 5). These include “shop upcycled items,” “visit museum Fashion for Good” (a sustainable fashion museum), “Donate to BlackLivesMatter.” This is further reflected in the app’s invocation of terms such as “your journey.” They thereby center the individual consumer with the aim to “empower[ing] you to wear sustainable choices in your own terms.” Renoon’s use of online millennial cultural discourse such as star signs when highlighting the “Gemini’s seasons” fashion trends might reflect the CEO’s former career as a yoga YouTuber.

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Figure 5.

Selecting ‘goals’ in Renoon.

The app combines this self-optimization discourse with ethical consumption ideas that the world can be politically improved through consumption, an idea roundly criticized in the literature (Stolle and Micheletti, 2013). The app often sends a notification, for example, reading “we have so much power to change the world by just being careful in what we buy.” Renoon mixes self-improvement culture with ethical consumption ideology. Through an optimized self, an optimized (fashion) world can come into being.

In short, the eco-progressive values afforded by the transparency apps are embedded in ideologies centered around individual rights (GOY) and consumerist self-optimization (Renoon).

Prioritizing material-technical over aesthetic qualities

An important part of the politics of transparency is its strong emphasis on a material-technical logic of fashion. Transparency apps do not just operate in a market for clothing but also in a cultural field of fashion with its symbolic logic and hierarchies. The apps’ politics of transparency upsets this logic. The apps elevate material-technical qualities of fashion as important markers of value to the extent that they can fulfill the political needs of the values and ideologies outlined above. Doing so, transparency apps diminish fashion’s aesthetic logic and bring the material-technical side of the fashion industry firmly to the symbolic part of the cultural field. This has implications for both consumers and producers.

This is most strongly visible within Retraced, which allows users to scan product barcodes (Figure 6). A map of the “journey” of the garment then appears, including where the yarn was sourced, the fabric processed and raw material like cotton was farmed. By putting pins on a map, the material supply chain suddenly becomes visible. The Retraced app allows the consumer to check additional information on all production stages. For example, users can consult a pdf-file of a manufacturers’ Global Organic Textile Standards-certificate for a given shipment of textile, a dominant standard for organic textiles.

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Figure 6.

The ‘journey' of a product in Retraced.

This clashes with the usual aesthetic logic of fashion. While Renoon allows (but not requests) users to put in preferred aesthetic styles, Retraced and GOY ignore aesthetic aspects of fashion altogether. In transparency politics, a garments’ looks and designer is less important than who spun the yarn or where the factory is located. In addition, GOY and Renoon offer editorial content that educates the consumer about materiality (see Figure 7). GOY regularly includes “material guides” within the app which encourages users to learn more about production processes and ecological costs. No similar guides on aesthetics are offered.

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Figure 7.

Editorial content in Renoon.

Not only do the apps shift attention away from aesthetics for consumers but they also invite producers to make production choices based on technical-political rather than aesthetic grounds. Renoon, Retraced, and GOY have business-to-business operations to advise producers on how to best communicate and do sustainable production (interview Retraced; Good on You, 2021; Renoon, 2022) For example, GOY’s guide for producers recommends brands to consider “materials with less water use, such as organic hemp or organic linen” (Good on You, 2021: 12). Equally, they suggest making more long-lasting garments with “multi-year guarantee.” GOY thus invites producers not to make production choices based on aesthetic imperatives such as novelty or a certain fabric’s feel and look, but rather based on technical-material imperatives that stem from the apps’ political values. Yet adopting this advice to improve ratings changes garment’s aesthetic qualities: a different fabric has a different touch and feel. GOY, like Renoon and Retraced, thus compels producers to make structurally different technical production choices with potentially durable aesthetic consequences. Transparency apps thus influence the decisions of established producers in fashion that traditionally base their production on fashion’s “aesthetic economy” (cf. Entwistle, 2009). Now this aesthetic economy contends with a political-technical economy of fashion.

Transparency apps thus stimulate fashion as a so-called “moralized market” (Balsiger, 2021). In moralized markets, political and social standards contribute to product value, sometimes competing and sometimes fusing with a product’s more conventional qualities. These moralized markets are often the result of strategic social movement intervention to push consumers and producers to value products in a moral light (Dubuisson-Quellier, 2013). Similarly, transparency apps re-evaluate the worth of fashion on political-moral grounds. In an aesthetic economy like fashion, this means tension or fusion with the usual aesthetic logic.

It is not unusual for materiality to play a role in cultural production, from architecture to food or fashion itself (Adler et al., 2022). But fashion culture’s strong aesthetic logic rarely extends materially beyond the quality of textiles to explicitly include garments’ physical production chain. By prioritizing technical-material qualities and ignoring aesthetics, the politics of transparency is a frontal assault on usual aesthetic logics of fashion.

Personalized politics

But in what form do these apps afford this politics of transparency to users? In two out of three apps, GOY and Renoon, the politics of transparency is offered in a personalized form. This is related to their business model and reflects the apps’ digital context.

GOY allows users to set their “ethical preferences” in the “my preferences” menu under the “my profile” tab (see Figure 8). The preferences can be given along three slider scales for “Animal Protection,” “Labor Rights,” and “Environment,” ranging from “less important” to “very important.” GOY does not demand to set these preferences and the “my profile” tab is rather inconspicuous. But the app encourages users to do so “[we] will find and recommend brands just for you.” This refers to the “offers” section with affiliate links that give the company a monetary kickback for each purchase (interview GOY). Personalization is thus related to the app’s business model.

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Figure 8.

Setting profile preferences in Good on You.

This is more pronounced in Renoon, which operates with a more commercial business model. The app personalizes user experiences by curating a “feed” of suggested products. At the top of the screen, the feed displays brands in circles, like Instagram’s story feed. This personalization is further reflected in the philosophy in the publications of Renoon: “We have the final responsibility to make the best choice that fits our own personal universe (…) pick your battles” (Renoon, 2022b).

To curate the feed, Renoon builds a user profile (see Figure 9). The user profile is built on users’ selected values, the goals they set for themselves as well as the other users and brands they follow. The app encourages users to fill in this data through nudging notifications. This profile is public, and the app allows profiles to be found through users’ phone numbers. Renoon also encourages to follow other users, most prominently users with a "checkmark" resembling the blue checkmarks of verified social media profiles. In addition to the public profile, Renoon collects users' metadata, geo-location of their photos, interaction patterns including swipes and gestures, and general browsing history on the device using cookies even outside the app. The privacy policy and general terms of the app do not explain why but do stipulate it remarkets data to offer tailored advertisements on third-party websites (Renoon b, n.d.).

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Figure 9.

User profiles in Renoon.

At Renoon, transparency cuts both ways: producers and consumers are “made transparent” to each other. This has two implications. First, transparency apps integrate political and economic aims and are political and economic actors. Some pursue monetization just to reach social goals, like GOY which brands itself a social impact company. In GOY, affiliate links are only a minor part of the apps’ revenue stream that also consists of sponsored newsletters and the sale of brands' transparency data to retailers. The company categorically rules out marketing user data (interview GOY). On the other end of the spectrum, Renoon promotes transparency as part of a commercial business. The company is funded by venture capitalist investors that seek a return on investment (Turra, 2021). Renoon therefore relies on monetization of user data. This blend of economics and politics sets a commercial transparency app like Renoon apart from social movements promoting transparency without economic aims. Fashion Revolution, for example, publishes transparency indexes to force businesses to do better and consumers to be able to make better choices. In short, the politics of transparency borders on and in some cases veers into the business of transparency.

Secondly, Renoon’s data collection to build user profiles resembles the logic of social media platforms as described in the work of Poell et al. (2021). These platforms “facilitate and shape personalised interactions among end-users and complementors, organised through the systematic collection, algorithmic processing, monetisation, and circulation of data” (Poell et al., 2019)), where complementors are sellers that offer something to end-users—in this case fashion. Renoon seems to contribute to the platformization of fashion, much more so than GOY or Retraced. This influence of social media platforms and their logic in fashion is not new. The growing influence of Instagram culture and TikTok influencers in fashion is well documented (De Perthuis and Findlay 2019). The novelty here lies in the combination of this platform logic with political ideas around fashion transparency in dedicated apps.