Sydney - The fashion industry is famous for its lack of taste and obsequious pandering to the rich and mindless. It’s also famous for its ability to look sincere every time it does something disgusting. A new pattern of child labour abuse is now emerging.
My family has a long history in the industry. My uncle designed clothes for the original flappers in London in the 1930s. I have a cousin who’s a been major achiever in the Australian rag trade for decades. What you learn when you’ve got fashion in the family is you don’t follow fashion- You make it.
The other thing you learn is that this is without a doubt the most facile, vicious industry in the world in many ways. I’m always surprised PETA doesn’t come up with a campaign to deal with the apparently obsessive, endless sleaze of some of the industry’s human abuses. OK, the industry is ultra-competitive, and OK, all product runs do mean financial risks, but you really have to question the theory that there are any possible justifications, however grotesque, for some of the current abuses. Apparently not content with sweatshops around the world, now both the sources of materials and the marketing are part of the act.
Let’s start with child labour, Fair Trade, and Victoria’s Secret. Bloomberg, to its eternal credit, recently ran an expose on “Fair Trade” abuses using child labour in Burkina Faso to supply Victoria’s Secret. Poverty barely begins to describe the working conditions of kids supplying the world’s best known secret. If the Bloomberg article is a representation of basic fair trade conditions, it’s a very dirty, inexcusable secret indeed.
This is a basic excerpt- Please read the Bloomberg article on the link in full, because it’s a truly efficient, excellent in depth study of both the sacred “Fair Trade helps the poor” motif (the same way a butcher helps a sheep, apparently) and the realities of the industry’s nasty little habits: