A report that highlighted leading luxury and fast-fashion brands for lack of visibility in their supply chains has been roundly criticised by companies themselves as well as other nongovernmental organizations involved with workers’ rights and supply chain issues. The report by the London-based group called Fashion Revolution and Ethical Consumer, which is a nonprofit magazine and Web site, created a Fashion Transparency Index that ranked more than 40 global retail companies based on their level of transparency and support of workers’ rights. Based on its own rankings, the group criticised luxury brands including Chanel, Hermès, Prada and Louis Vuitton for what it claimed was a lack of transparency, while praising Levi Strauss, Inditex, Nike, H&M and Adidas. The critical study was reported online by Vice and also picked up by Vogue.com.

Incidentally, the index was based on a methodology that immediately stirred criticism. WWD contacted a series of industry organizations that work on sustainability initiatives but they declined to comment. A spokesperson from one of the organizations said it is really hard to comment on research that is so poorly executed and tells us nothing.

The group said that in the report that it received 10 questionnaires from brands and retailers out of a total of 40 that were sent to companies. While 10 of the companies received scores based on their replies to the questionnaires and other publicly available information, the other 30 companies were scored based solely on publicly available information on Web sites and in annual reports, from which the group’s researchers drew their own conclusions.