Paul Tanner
Lucire always looks after its alumni: Samantha O’Reilly, who was interning here last month, is back at Otago Polytechnic in Dunedin preparing for her end-of-year collection. We’re issuing a note for anyone who might wish to see this very talented young designer succeed, and to join us in pledging some money for her collection, Celebrating New Zealand Fashion. She has a page at PledgeMe up where she explains more about it.
Walk on water
J Model Management, which brought us the world’s highest (Earthbound) fashion show at the Petronas Twin Towers, is set to do another spectacular, this time on the Seine. Only July 30, the catwalk will be set on the river’s largest boat, Le Jean Bruel, with collections from four continents.
‘[Organizer] Jessica Minh Anh will create the illusion that the models are walking on water, by arranging for guests to sit facing the multi-facetted glass windows surrounding Le Jean Bruel,’ says the release. Brands include Mauzan (UAE), Verano High (USA), Richard Rozbora (Austria), Les Folies De (France), Joyce Pilarsky (the Philippines), Chula (Spain), Bitru Fariel (Poland), Limkokwing (Malaysia) and Hoang Hai (Vietnam).
Protests over Adidas’s workers’ wages in Asia
We’ve received a release from War on Want, which states that protesters headed in to Adidas’ flagship store on Oxford Street, London, to put ’34p’ tags on Adidas products which campaign group Labour Behind the Label has identified as coming from Indonesian sweatshops.
Labour Behind the Label alleges that the London Olympics’ organizing committee breaches an agreement that merchandise suppliers must pay workers a sustainable living wage. War on Want also cites the Playfair 2012 campaign which found workers for Adidas’s contractors in China working 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. ‘In Sri Lanka researchers found people being forced to work overtime in order to meet production targets. In the Philippines, more than half the workers interviewed said that in order to cover their basic needs they are forced to pawn their ATM cards to loan sharks for high-interest loans. At all of the factories researchers visited, workers reported that they were not paid a living wage that covers their basic needs.’
Kiwi expat Bill Anderson, who is now Adidas’s Head of Social and Environmental Affairs for the Asia Pacific region, has responded to the allegations on the company’s blog, stating, ‘Pay has to be considered in terms of what it buys locally. So if you earn a dollar in India and a dollar in the USA what you can buy for that dollar is very different, given the differences in the costs of living in each country. To get around this economists usually compare pay in terms of Purchasing Power Parity, or PPP, against a common basket of goods.’ To Adidas’s credit, it is publishing negative responses to Anderson’s blog post as well.