It was on this day five years ago that cracks began to appear in the walls of Rana Plaza, the ill-fated complex of clothes factories and shops in Savar, 15 miles outside the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka.

Though employees were sent home, they returned to work the following day and around 3,100 were inside when the building began to give way.

After a power outage, large generators on the roof had been fired up – sending powerful vibrations through the structure and creating more cracks in load-bearing columns.

That caused the building’s floors to collapse in on themselves, trapping thousands of workers in a concrete concertina that ultimately killed 1,138 people and left many others with life-changing injuries.

The sorry episode, one of the deadliest industrial accidents in history, shocked the world. And as clothes labels began to be plucked from the rubble, it left many major fashion brands, including Britain’s Primark, Matalan and Bonmarche, with questions to answer.

The disaster has come to be the most potent symbol of how fashion chains lost control of their supply chains as they offshored manufacturing in the pursuit of lower costs.

Even those brands who were not implicated were left with a startling reminder of how much harm they could cause by not keeping their supply chains in check.