In the 2006 comedy-drama film, The Devil Wears Prada, Andy Sachs is an aspiring journalist who lands a job as junior personal assistant to Miranda Priestly, the editor-in-chief of Runway magazine. At the beginning, Andy struggles with being able to succeed in her position, getting into all sorts of trouble—including a scene where she Miranda confronts Andy about her lack of interest in fashion, where she makes the iconic speech about the cerulean sweater. The screenplay, written by Aline Brosh McKenna, was based on Lauren Weisberger’s 2003 novel, The Devil Wears Prada.
The film provided an interesting insider perspective on Wintour, who is the rumored inspiration behind Miranda’s character, as Weisberger worked as a personal assistant for her during her time at Vogue. Both the film and book made the culture between staff at the publication very clear. And while it may be easy to reduce the treatment of Andy to simply “just a movie,” thousands of people undergo similar treatment by leaders in the fashion industry every single day.
The exploitation of skilled labor in the fashion industry is something that is often referred to only in the context of fast fashion and the production of the clothing, completely disregarding those who work for little to no money within styling, designing, photography and event planning. It isn’t just an occurrence in affordable brands, but it also exists at the heart of the powerfully symbolic within the maisons de couture, the coveted luxury brands.
At the forefront of the exploitation of these people is the capitalism that is deeply rooted in the fashion industry. In France, the capital of the fashion world, fashion is the second most profitable industry after cars, bringing in around 16 billion dollars every single year. Stefanie Marsh, a writer at The Guardian, calls fashion the center of contemporary capitalism, one that upholds the old forms of exploitation such as child labor and factories in Bangladesh. Marsh also says that the industry also upholds new and modern forms of exploitation, one that is self-inflicted, where the line between work and everything you are outside of work is blurred.
Just as in The Devil Wears Prada, workers oftentimes justify the horrible treatment with, “Oh, he’s a genius. That’s what geniuses do.” While creative directors and CEO’s may earn salaries well over $10,000 per month, skilled workers are at the bottom of the barrel, barely making minimum wage. It’s the glamorization of domination, putting the hero/tyrant on a pedestal while ultimately being exploited by them for capital gain.
Within the fashion industry, clout comes with a price: a salary that is next to nothing. In a dissertation titled The Most Beautiful Job in the World, Giulia Mensitieri takes the fashion industry and exposes it completely with the story of “Mia”, an Italian stylist who had moved to Paris. In it, she writes “She was wearing Chanel shoes and carrying a Prada handbag, being flown across the world in business class. I never would have imagined that she was in the situation she was in.” At the time, Mia couldn’t afford to rent a room and was couch surfing at a friend’s house “behind a screen in the kitchen”. Mensitieri would go on to point out that working in fashion meant being seen in constantly updated expensive clothing and accessories—but at what price? At times, Mia did not know when she would be paid for a job and how much she would be getting. For a week’s work, a large luxury brand gave her a voucher of €5,000 (about $5,500). The catch? It was a voucher to their own boutique.
Throughout her research for the dissertation, Mensitieri discovered that the payments made in exchange for work are often times in the form of social status, the industry conferring on those who work in it. “The message is, you don’t have to be paid because you are lucky to be there at all,” she says, referring to the convoluted payments in forms of vouches to designer boutiques, first-class flights to fashion shoots and accommodations in luxury hotels. “There is a kind of confused denial of the norms of labor conditions”. Most importantly, all of the popularity and free flights in the world don’t put food on the table.
The exploitation within the fashion industry reaches just beyond what we easily see, it lives in developing and unregulated economies, in countries that we regularly view as luxurious and as the epitome of fashion and class. Labor issues exist within countries such as Italy and France, within glossy paged publications and houses like Chanel and Dior. It takes advantage of those looking to be the next hottest thing, expecting people to work for free or simply for exposure. It’s time we bring attention to this issue outside of movies like The Devil Wears Prada and recognize all forms of exploitation within the fashion industry for what they truly are.
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