Not fashionable

They are filthy with mud streaking their faces and matted hair. The mother holds her son, her parted lips revealing that she has no teeth. Her daughter follows behind her, looking on despondently. They could be beggars on the crowded Indian street. Well, except that the toddler is donning a Fendi bib worth more than two months’ income for an impoverished family in rural India.

They appeared in the August issue of Vogue India. Other similar pictures, including a barefoot man with a Burberry umbrella and a family of three squeezed onto a motorbike with a Hermes handbag exemplified the emerging trend of ‘Third World’ chic. Earlier in the summer, clothing designed by India’s downtrodden and impoverished women made an appearance on the New York catwalk. The sixteen-page Vogue spread is the most recent example of bringing the Indian lower class into fashion.

India’s leading social commentators have attacked the photo shoot as ‘distasteful’ and ‘callous’ - and rightfully so. The decision to utilize some of the poorest peasants in India, many of whom are living on less than about a dollar a day, according to the World Bank, for a photo shoot featuring obscenely luxurious fashion items was exploitative and seriously trivializes the plight of people who are legitimately struggling to survive. In a country where hundreds of farmers commit suicide every year due to crop failures and increasing debt, it is not amusing to use huts and dirt roads as a backdrop for designer fashion accessories. Additionally, Vogue did not even name the models, listing them only as ‘man’ or ‘woman’ while pouring out details regarding accessories and store locations.

Leading fashion designer David Abraham defended Vogue saying that critics should relax because fashion is really all about fun and because “wealth next to poverty is just a reality in India.”  While this may be true, using people who struggle on a daily basis to obtain food in order to serve the purpose of fashionable fun is beyond distasteful. Kanika Gahlaut, a leading Indian columnist, responded to the pictures: “There’s nothing ‘fun or funny’ about putting a poor person in a mud hut in clothing designed by Alexander McQueen. There are farmer suicides here for God’s sake.” The actual distribution of Vogue in India drives home the serious state of affairs for the majority of the population: The magazines are sold mainly at roadside junctions by bonded child laborers who are often sold by their parents to gangmasters at an early age and earn just a few pennies per copy.

While it is clear that Vogue and the designer fashion industry were attempting to gain name recognition and advertise to the rapidly expanding and newly rich elite in India, a spread involving not India’s upper class, which could actually purchase the items, but impoverished members of the lower class was an extremely offensive and repugnant decision. As economic disparities in India continue to increase, luxury brands need to be more tasteful and respectful in their future endeavors into the new market.