The country has undergone an economic miracle in recent years, albeit at huge cost to its garment workers. But things are finally starting to improve for them
Tasnia Akter has come home. It’s a public holiday in Bangladesh, the one time of year the 25-year-old can leave the mayhem of the city behind and see her family: her mother, her aunt.
And her daughter.
Continue reading...Social media trend was started by a teen to push back against unrealistic beauty standards
In a new wave of Russian feminism, thousands of women are posting selfies on social media showing their pimples, cellulite and hair loss to challenge beauty stereotypes that women’s rights activists say fuel low self-esteem and eating disorders.
The #AllIsFineWithMe trend – started by a Russian teen who has struggled with anorexia – is the latest initiative to push back against unrealistic pressures on women and girls to look perfect, often driven by airbrushed images on social media.
Continue reading...The actor’s appearance in ‘That’ dress from 2000 had the crowd in Milan whooping
One of the lesser-known aspects of Versace’s brand mythology is its role in the inception of Google Images.
The story goes like this. In the year 2000 – as fashion scholars will recall – Jennifer Lopez wore a sheer, low-cut green Versace dress to the Grammys. “The whole world wanted to see that dress,” said Donatella Versace at a press conference in Milan on Friday. And so the world surfed the net – as we used to say – but couldn’t find the picture within the mainly text-based system. And lo, Google Images was born.
Continue reading...In the middle of Spring 2020 presentations, influential designer announces he is leaving label he co-founded
Fashion’s enfant terrible Demna Gvasalia quit his uber-hip streetwear brand Vetements, in a move that shocked the industry.
Related: ‘I don’t think elegance is relevant’: Vetements’ Demna Gvasalia, the world’s hottest designer
Continue reading...At 19, Legler broke the Olympic freestyle swimming record. But she was also an alcoholic and drug dealer who had suffered years of abuse from her trainers. She is surprised she is still alive, she says
One day, when she was a teenager, Casey Legler woke up with a hangover, then jumped into a pool and broke the Olympic freestyle swimming record. The year was 1996 and Legler was in Atlanta, a member of the French team, having a practice session as she awaited the Olympic finals the next day. Legler, at 6ft 2in, was built to swim. She had been groomed to be an Olympian from the age of 12. But when the finals came – the biggest day of her professional life – she bombed, coming 29th in the women’s 50m freestyle. She spent the next day drunk and dealing cocaine – to Olympic teammates and teenage members of other international teams.
That is perhaps the most troubling aspect of Legler’s new memoir, which charts her time as one of the fastest female swimmers in the world. This isn’t just the story of an alcoholic girl who, under the supposedly protective wing of coaches and doctors, was sexually abused and given performance-enhancing drugs. It’s how her experience was not unusual among her female peers. She remembers, for instance, a teenage member of the English Olympic team asking her to buy drugs. Alcohol and drug use, she says, were commonplace among top-level child athletes, not just in celebratory post-competition blow-outs but every night. From the age of 12, “I swam for every chance to get wasted,” she writes.
Continue reading...Women routinely face sexual assault and exploitation in factories, many of which supply western brands. A grassroots movement is helping victims to seek justice
Dolly Akhtar was only 16 when she started work in a garment factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, stitching clothing destined for shop floors in western countries thousands of miles away. She accepted the long hours and low pay, but what she wasn’t expecting was the sexual advances of her older, married line manager.
“When the line manager at the very first factory I worked at tried to get me to sleep with him, I was terrified,” she says. She left her job and found another but encountered similar problems there. “At the other factory, the management would curse and hit us. The men leered at us,” she says.
Continue reading...Ex-model is one of three women accusing the model scout and friend of Jeffrey Epstein
Thysia Huisman had just turned 18 when, late one evening in September 1991, she arrived before the door of an imposing apartment building on avenue Hoche in central Paris carrying a small backpack and three photographs from her portfolio.
A young would-be model from Leiden in the Netherlands, she was impressed, but also alarmed. “It was very grand,” she says. “A vast, grand apartment, right by the Arc de Triomphe. Fancy furniture, paintings on the walls. But it was his home.”
Continue reading...The German photographer, who worked on the Duchess of Sussex’s Vogue cover, was best known for his 90s portraits of Linda Evangelista, Naomi Campbell and others
German fashion photographer Peter Lindbergh, who died on Tuesday aged 74, was renowned for black-and-white portraits that appeared in magazines including Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and the New Yorker, as well as his refusal to retouch images. Recently, Lindbergh photographed women for the “Forces for Change” issue of British Vogue, guest-edited by Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, including Jane Fonda, the climate activist Greta Thunberg, and New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern.
On the duke and duchess’s official Instagram account, Meghan shared an image of herself with the photographer, captioned: “His work is revered globally for capturing the essence of a subject and promoting healthy ideals of beauty, eschewing photoshopping, and preferring natural beauty with minimal makeup.”
Continue reading...Video for ‘Sauvage’ fragrance has been called ‘deeply offensive and racist’ and the fashion brand has removed it from social media
Dior is facing backlash for promoting its perfume line Sauvage with an advertisement featuring Native American imagery.
The fashion brand teased the ad, which stars actor Johnny Depp, on Twitter on Friday as “an authentic journey deep into the Native American soul in a sacred, founding and secular territory”. It has since deleted the tweet and all references to the campaign on social media.
Continue reading...Women are walking around in bad bras because the focus is on sexiness not function – who cares if women are uncomfortable?
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Continue reading...Women at factories in Lesotho owned by Taiwanese firm say jobs and promotions in jeopardy if they refuse advances, claims report
Women producing jeans for American brands including Levi Strauss, Wrangler and Lee have been forced to sleep with their managers to keep their jobs or gain promotion, an investigation into sexual harassment and coercion at garment factories in Lesotho has found.
Brands have responded to the “extensive” allegations by the the US-based Worker Rights Consortium by signing enforceable agreements with labour and women’s rights groups to eliminate gender-based violence for more than 10,000 workers at five factories owned by the Taiwanese company Nien Hsing, one of the southern African country’s largest employers.
Continue reading...One of China’s best-known actors, Yang Mi, ends contract over controversy
The luxury fashion label Versace and its artistic director, Donatella Versace, apologised to China on Sunday after one of its T-shirts was criticised for identifying the semi-autonomous regions of Hong Kong and Macau as countries.
Versace said on its Weibo account that it had made a mistake and had stopped selling and destroyed the T-shirts on 24 July.
Continue reading...For years, a giant brass and Sèvres porcelain grasshopper that could, if needed, double as a wine-cooler sat outside the royal apartments at Windsor Castle; a gift from French president Georges Pompidou to the Duke of Edinburgh during a state visit to France in 1972.
Across the Channel, an hour from Paris, the home of its late creator François-Xavier Lalanne and his artist wife Claude is full of such wonderful and whimsical creatures: a huge rhinoceros that transforms into a desk; a bronze cabbage on chicken legs; a herd of sheep that can be sat on, tables of enormous ginkgo leaves.
Continue reading...More than half of all textiles produced each year include plastic. Now the urgent search is on for a more sustainable way to clothe the world
It was probably the only time a 93-year-old has stolen the show at Glastonbury’s Pyramid stage. Sir David Attenborough had important things to say when he warmed up for Kylie Minogue last month. After showing scenes from Blue Planet 2, the wildlife series credited with inspiring a sea change in attitudes towards plastics pollution, the broadcaster thanked festival goers and organisers for banning single-use water bottles. “This great festival has gone plastic-free,” he said to cheers. “Thank you! Thank you!”
Kylie’s crowd was right to feel virtuous – single-use plastic is an oil-derived menace to marine life – but how many paused to look down at the elastic in their waistbands, the polyester in their T-shirts and the nylon in their shoes? Plastic in what we wear may be less visible than it is in bottles or straws, but it is no less toxic. Yet somehow we have woven it so tightly into our throwaway society that we barely notice it, even when it is on our own backs. Now there are moves – at the top and bottom of a complex global supply chain – to do something about it.
Continue reading...Owner of Vuitton, Dior and Givenchy sees British designer as part of push to sustainability
Stella McCartney has signed a deal with France’s largest luxury group, LVMH, to “accelerate its worldwide development in terms of business and strategy”.
The news, announced on Monday, comes just over a year after McCartney ended her 17-year business partnership with LVMH’s rival conglomerate, Kering, and bought back its 50% stake in her eponymous brand. Further details of the deal will be announced in September, although it has been confirmed that McCartney will remain majority owner and continue as creative director. She currently oversees womenswear, menswear and childrenswear collections.
Continue reading...Son of the ruler of Sharjah has died, three weeks after showing at London fashion week
The fashion designer Khalid Al Qasimi has died, it has been announced. He was the crown prince and second son of Sheikh Dr Sultan bin Muhammad Al Qasimi, the ruler of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, where a three-day period of mourning has been decreed with flags ordered to fly at half-mast. Details surrounding the cause of death were not officially disclosed.
The designer, also known as Sheikh Khalid bin Sultan Al Qasimi, showed his spring/summer 2020 collection for his eponymous brand, Qasimi, on the London fashion week men’s showcase three weeks ago to critical acclaim. The 39-year-old designer was a graduate in architecture and fashion design from Central Saint Martins in London and presented his first collection, which was launched in collaboration with the designer Elliott James Frieze, in the capital in 2008.
Continue reading...Company automatically posted pictures of new shirts with offensive Twitter handles on back
Adidas UK has come under fire after a social media gambit backfired spectacularly, leading to the company tweeting out pictures of its shirts with racist and offensive slogans on the back.
The error came as Adidas launched a social media campaign, #DareToCreate, in conjunction with its release of the new Arsenal home kit.
Continue reading...The designer’s SS20 collection once again proved her talent for making a splash; elsewhere, Dolce & Gabbana put the leopard into leopard print
From one 90s superstar to another … Donatella Versace dedicated her spring/summer 2020 menswear show to the Progidy’s Keith Flint in Milan at the weekend. The designer described the musician, who died in March this year, as “my friend, and a disruptor of this world”.
Homage was paid through the pounding soundtrack of the band’s monster hit, Firestarter, and models bearing his distinctive double mohawk and tinted bug-eye sunglasses. Although the revelation that Flint and Versace were friends may have come as a surprise, it’s not an incongruous pairing; Versace has been something of a disruptor herself. Picking up the mantle of the family business her brother, Gianni, established in 1978, she embraced full-blown sex appeal in her collections from day one, and has admitted in the past to not knowing how to do things quietly. Last year, she surprised the world when she announced that she sold her family company to Capri Holdings – formerly known as Michael Kors Holdings.
Continue reading...It’s hard to imagine men enduring decades of pain and long-term physical injury just to “look the part” in the workplace – after all, many bemoan the necktie as too restrictive for the daily grind.
Now consider this: millions of women around the world, at all levels of the workplace hierarchy, have consistently spent their working hours tortured by blisters, bloodied flesh, foot pain, knee pain, back pain and worse, as a result of the pressure to conform to an aesthetic code – sometimes explicitly written into contracts or policy, more often subliminally expected as a societal and cultural standard – that deems it appropriate to wear high heels.
Continue reading...There must have been reasons for Eric, Donnie Jr, Tiffany and the rest to have accompanied the president on his state visit. Does the answer lie in their social media postings?
How did the Trump family’s UK state visit look from social media?
Charlie, via email
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