
The True Cost
Fast fashion's price tag never includes what it actually costs to make a five-dollar t-shirt, and director Andrew Morgan traces that gap from Western shopping malls back to the factories that supply them. The film opens on the 2013 Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh, where a garment factory building fell and killed over a thousand workers, and uses it as the anchor for a wider account of how clothing brands drove prices down by moving production to countries with the weakest labor protections. Interviews range from garment workers and labor organizers in Bangladesh and Cambodia to cotton farmers in India dealing with pesticide exposure, alongside industry figures like Stella McCartney and Livia Firth who argue for change from inside the fashion business. The film also follows the environmental side of the chain, showing how cheap dye and synthetic fabric production pollute water supplies near manufacturing hubs. It builds toward a simple question: who actually pays when clothes get cheaper, and the answer keeps landing on the people least able to refuse the work.