The Independent

April 20, 1997, Sunday

Closer to home, the monitoring group Human Rights Watch has announced that

the situation vis-a-vis human rights and the multinationals is drastically

deteriorating. One of Gandhi's six sins of the world was commerce without

morality, in which case the garment industry has been one of the biggest sinners

in the business community. Bill Clinton and leaders of that industry have just

announced a code of conduct to combat sweatshops world-wide. A listed criterion

of the code's success is how much consumers should be told about violations. The

tentative tone of this commitment to transparency is understandable, given the

efficacy of consumer boycotts in the past. But I can't believe a signatory such

as Nike, with its well-documented worker abuse in Vietnam, has any option. It

is, of course, a supreme irony that the business of fashion, a "woman's"

business, is largely built on the exploitation of female labour. But fashion

thrives on irony. Last week in New York, it was difficult to escape coverage of

next autumn's collections, and the big news was the return of power-dressing.

Power- dressing is the consummate fashion illusion, all style, no substance, a

bone thrown by the fashion world to the relatively powerless woman in the

street.