Ecouterre

Photo by Olivier Saillant for Chanel

As if fashion wasn’t already synonymous with environmental excess. Karl Lagerfeld commisioned a life-size aircraft to house Chanel’s Spring/Summer 2012 couture show inside the Grand Palais in Paris on Tuesday. Subtlety has never been the designer’s strongest suit—this is the man who flew a 265-ton glacier to the City of Lights on a whim, after all—but the display of such extravagance in a depressed economy feels gauche even by the most liberal standards. Set designers didn’t just spend five days constructing the plane (or at least, the innards of one) from anodized aluminum. They also outfitted it with an extra-wide 164-foot aisle, 180-degree swivel seats for 250 high-profile guests, double-C monogrammed carpet, a holographic cockpit, and a slatted roof that revealed a vista of clouds. Mon dieu!

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Skimpy underthings, fabricated events, thinly veiled threats, and a dead girl’s birth certificate—just when you thought the Victoria’s Secret West African child-labor scandal couldn’t get any weirder, now Homeland Security is leaping into the fray, according to Bloomberg News on Friday. The media outlet, which “outed” the lingerie empire in December for allegedly using underaged labor in its so-called “fair trade” line of undergarments, also refuted claims by Fairtrade International that the story was complete bunk. To thicken the plot, Fairtrade International, which oversees the fair-trade program in Burkina Faso, has also removed certain assertions about Bloomberg’s report from its website, specifically one that claimed that Cam Simpson, the reporter, asked a girl and her family to pose in a cotton field under false pretenses.

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Photos by Sheila Roth for Fox 9 News

Priscilla of Boston, best known for creating Grace Kelly’s yellow organdy bridesmaid dresses, is no more. But the 65-year-old bridal chain isn’t going out with a whimper. On Friday, eyewitnesses caught staffers spray-painting thousands of dollars’ worth of bridal and formal gowns in a dumpster outside a Priscilla of Boston boutique in Edina, MN, just shortly after the company announced it was shuttering all 19 of its locations. “I picked up a dress that was a Vera Wang, and the tag said $6,000 dollars,” Bessie Giannakakis, owner of Bessie’s Boutique, told Fox 9 News on Monday. “You wanted to throw up in the dumpster. You really did.”

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Knockoff designer bags are a dime a dozen in China, but the nation’s latest “It bag” requires less effort—and money up front—from counterfeit rackets. Instead of paying a premium for leatherette imitations, Chinese tastemakers are ponying up for faux logo-emblazoned Chanel, Louis Vuitton, and Gucci shopping bags made of plain ol’ paper, according to China Daily. The paper totes, which range from …

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We give up; we can’t keep up with the Kardashians anymore, nor do we want to. After drawing the ire of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals for wearing fur, Kim and her reality TV clan are now under fire from a human-rights watchdog group for hawking products allegedly made with slave labor, according to Star. In order to bring their K-Dash by Kardashian, Kris Jenner Kollection, and ShoeDazzle labels to market, sweatshop workers in China’s Guangdong province—some as young as 16—were said to have labored for 84 hours over a seven-day work week to help Kim and kompany rake in $65 million in profits last year. The workers, in contrast, received a mere $1 an hour for their efforts, making as little as $15 a month after food and rent. Talk about economic inequality.

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The halo on Victoria’s Secret is looking a tad askew after a report alleged that malnourished, underaged West African children picked the cotton used in some of its undergarments, including a number labeled as fair trade and organic. In a startling exposé by Bloomberg News, reporter Cam Simpson documents the heart-wrenching story of 13-year-old Clarisse Kambire, who works on an organic-cotton farm in Burkina Faso under a program designed to financially empower women and enable more children to attend school. But Kambire’s reality couldn’t be further from the truth. Beaten and verbally abused, she labors in the fields on bare hands and feet to harvest tiny tufts of fiber that are sent to factories in India and Sri Lanka to be fashioned into leopard-print hip-hugger panties and lacy fishnet thongs.

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Republican presidential nominee Newt Gingrich sent fashion and human-rights circles bristling after he denounced child labor laws as “truly stupid” in a public appearance in November. The former Speaker of the House and GOP frontrunner called for a relaxation of child labor laws, even as workers’ rights abuses and underage exploitation persist unchecked in garment factories across the globe. “It’s tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in, first of all, child laws, which are truly stupid,” Gingrich said at an appearance at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. “Saying to people you shouldn’t go to work before you’re 14, 16. You’re totally poor, you’re in a school that’s failing with a teacher that’s failing.”

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Buy all the water-efficient appliances you want; a household’s indirect water usage, embodied in the consumption of goods and services, is far more significant, according to a paper published in the latest issue of Building Resources and Information. Agua is involved in everything we use or wear, from that state-of-the-art toaster to your favorite Rolling Stones T-shirt. “Water is required to obtain raw materials, in the manufacturing process, in transportation and to sell the item,” says Robert H. Crawford, a lecturer in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne and the study’s primary author. “Every item or service purchased by a household has a long line of resources and water usage.”

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Think that toxic chemicals are bad for you? It’s all part of a smear campaign, according to a new report by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based conservative think tank with documented ties to oil companies like Exxon and Texaco. The chief sources of misinformation, according to the nonprofit, are the Environmental Working Group and the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, two “environmental extremist groups”—per CEI—that are inciting fear through “outrageous and bogus claims” about chemical-laden cosmetics and personal-care products.

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Think of plastic pollution in the world’s oceans and visions of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch invariably come to mind. But an emerging breed of “microplastics,” defined as any plastic particle smaller than 1 nanometer—or one hundred-thousandth the width of a human hair—is raising health and safety concerns on shorelines across the globe. Unlike its larger brethren, however, microplastic pollution has a far more insidious cause. And, according to a study published in the November 1, 2011 issue of Environmental Science & Technology, our washing machines are partly to blame.

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Photos by Tommaso Galli for Greenpeace

Witnessing a fashion show in Italy, one of the meccas of the industry, isn’t a privilege many of us will experience. We can only imagine what it would entail: beautiful models, incredible clothing, champagne, and photographs of mass deforestation. Wait…what? Outside the renowned Linea Pelle leather trade show in Bologna on Wednesday, Greenpeace U.K. staged its own catwalk-cum-fashion-shoot. The goal? To draw attention to Brazilian leather and its inadvertent role in the destruction of the Amazon rainforest.

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Gucci has replaced senior managers at its flagship store in Shenzhen, China, after former staff accused the luxury house of sweatshop-like abuse. In an open letter in the Global Times, one of China’s English-language newspapers, five ex-employees claimed to have endured abuse so severe that they suffered from stomach and urinary illnesses, even miscarriages, under the strain. “It was a kind of torture for us to stand for more than 14 hours every day,” they said in the letter. “Short rest, water, or food was abandoned even for a pregnant employee.”

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Photo by Reuters

JCPenney has allegedly backed out of negotiations to compensate the families of victims killed at a Bangladesh factory fire in December, according to the International Labor Rights Forum. The big-box retailer is one of eight U.S. brands—including Abercrombie & Fitch, Gap, Calvin Klein, and Tommy Hilfiger—that manufactures its products at That’s It Sportswear, a garment factory just north of the capital of Dhaka. The fire, which broke out on the ninth and 10th floors of the multistory complex, killed 30 people and injured dozens—a result of blocked exits meant to control workers’ movements. It’s a situation eerily reminiscent of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory tragedy in New York City a century ago.

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You might consider missing out on Missoni for Target a tragedy, but trust us, that’s just the hyperbole talking. For the female garment workers in Jordan, however, the nightmare of cranking out cut-price clothing to sate American appetites is very real. After the Institute of Global Labour and Human Rights reported allegations of serial rape, abuse, and torture at Classic Factory—which makes clothing for U.S. companies such as Target, Walmart, Hanes, Macy’s, and Sears, and Land’s End—the fifth woman in two years has come forward to claim she was raped by a manager. “He said, if you try to do anything now, I’ll kill you right here,” the Bangladeshi national says in

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Nearly 300 Cambodian workers at a factory that manufactures clothing for H&M mysteriously took ill this week, according to a Reuters report on Thursday. At least 284 employees collapsed on Tuesday and Thursday at M&V International Manufacturing in Kompong Chhang province, 56 miles away from Phnom Penh, with some reporting a pungent odor before fainting. “Workers smelled something bad coming from the shirts,” Norn Leakhena, a worker at the factory, tells the news agency. Officials are blaming the faintings on the “weak” health of the workers, noting that the factory will be suspending operations until next week to allow its 4,000 workers to rest. H&M is investigating the faintings, but said that the government, local authorities, and UN’s International Labour Organization have found no “plausible causes so far.”

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Looks like Abercrombie & Fitch has another “situation” on deck, only this time it has nothing to do with getting the cast of Jersey Shore to doff its merch. The American retailer is among 14 global brands Greenpeace is calling out for allegedly releasing hormone-disrupting chemicals—specifically nonylphenol ethoxylates—into the environment. Used as surfactants in textile production, NPEs subsequently break down to form toxic nonphenol, an endocrine disruptor that builds up in the food chain and is pretty nasty even at minute levels.

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Spanish fast-fashion retailer Zara, known for its affordable knockoffs of runway designs, has been accused of allegedly using slave labor in more than 30 of its outsourced plants in Brazil. On an episode of the investigative TV show, A Liga, reporters visited a factory where Bolivian immigrant garment workers were caught in “slave-like conditions,” according to Forbes on Wednesday. Zara, a subsidiary of Inditex, one of the world’s largest apparel distributors, is now under investigation by Brazil’s labor ministry, which is cracking down on slave labor in the logging, charcoal, and sugarcane industries.

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We love musicians who love their fans back, but going so far as to want to wear your fans’ teeth? The ever-controversial Ke$ha, for one, isn’t afraid to bite off more than she can chew. “One fan sent me one tooth, so I made a necklace out of it,” she told Time Out New York on Friday. “But then I found a bunch of my baby teeth, and started realizing I would love to wear a piece …

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Photo by carool

Some of the biggest names in American retail have been linked to a Jordanian garment factory that allegedly rapes, tortures, and abuses its female workers, according to a report by the Institute of Global Labour and Human Rights, formerly known as the National Labor Committee. In a petition on Change.org, the human-rights organization accuses supervisors at Classic Factory, which supplies clothing to Walmart, Target, Macy’s, Kohl’s, Hanes, and Land’s End, of sexually assaulting dozens of migrant workers from Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, most of whom are virtually imprisoned in dilapidated surroundings. “We only went to Jordan to earn money to help our families,” says a young woman who goes by the name “Nazma” to protect her identity. “We had no idea that factory managers would rape so many of us young girls.”

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When Lady Gaga donned her controversial “meat dress” in September, the media went into a feeding frenzy. But nine months and dozens of outrageous getups later, we have to wonder what became of the beefy frock? Meatpaper, a magazine about art and..um…meat, grilled designer Franc Fernandez on its whereabouts. Long story short: It’s jerky. Cured and dried, then …

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It is an appalling fact that child labor is still an issue in various countries across the world. Children as young as 10 are subjected to unacceptable work conditions to produce garments for the European and U.S. markets, according to a new report by the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO), a nonprofit based in the Netherlands. A collaboration with the India Committee of the Netherlands, “Captured by Cotton” shines the spotlight on the exploitative Sumangali scheme, a form of bonded labor in India’s garment industry, particularly in the southern state of Tamil Nadu.

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