Fashion Exploitation

Perhaps it's because I have been listening to Dr. Martin Luther King's speeches all day, or maybe it's just because these types of things always enrage me, but this article I encountered in the New York Times today really, really made me angry: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/01/business/worldbusiness/01vogue.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

So the article highlights Vogue India's new fashion photoshoot. (Vogue is a fashion magazine). In it, there are 16 pages of impoverished Indians in every day life situations. Nothing is out of the ordinary in these photos (if you can call poverty 'ordinary')--except for the pricey items strategically placed in each photo. For example, in the above photo, the baby is wearing a $100 designer bib in a country where 456 million people live on less than $1.25 a day. Other 'fashion photos' include an elderly man holding a $200 Burberry umbrella and a family of three crammed onto a motorbike, one of whom is sporting a $10,000 bag.

BI should note that the Vogue editor said this of critics of the shoot:

“Lighten up,” she said in a telephone interview. Vogue is about realizing the “power of fashion” she said, and the shoot was saying that “fashion is no longer a rich man’s privilege. Anyone can carry it off and make it look beautiful,” she said.

“You have to remember with fashion, you can’t take it that seriously,” Ms. Tanna said. “We weren’t trying to make a political statement or save the world,” she said.


I really cannot express how angry this whole fiasco makes me. It is absolutely degrading to those living in poverty around the world and if I had ever spent a cent on that piece-of-trash-of-a-magazine, I would never do so again.

I had better go funnel some of my rage into something constructive...