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| | new balance 574 (8th Nov 21 at 8:39am UTC) | | Much of the Model Alliance’s work revolves around pushing for brand accountability—for instance, the Alliance created the RESPECT Program, a set of industry standards for model employment that companies throughout the fashion industry have been asked to sign onto.
We’ve got a multi-pronged approach. We work to create and support legislation, but we also acknowledge, new balance a this is a global industry, and it’s not like we can change laws in every jurisdiction all over the world, so we have to get the industry on board, and sign onto meaningful commitments. There need to be standards that are enforced no matter where people are working.
I don’t get the sense that the industry is leaping onto the “meaningful commitments” bandwagon.
It’s a work-in-progress. Look, back when I came out with the doc—which I really hadn’t intended as an exposé, by the way—I was treated like the girl biting the hand that fed me. I went from making a good living and putting myself through college to, in my senior year, my income totally stopping; the phone wasn’t ringing anymore, no one would book me once I started to talk about sexual abuse in the industry. And on the other hand, the general population wasn’t ready to comprehend that models could be an exploited workforce—it was like, get a real job if you don’t want to be harassed, don’t model bikinis if you want to be treated like a professional. That kind of attitude. And then everything changed with the publication of that first New York Times story about Harvey Weinstein, the one that prompted #metoo. I remember reading it and getting chills—not just because I knew how he operated, from my youth, but also because I could see, immediately, this was revolutionary. It was our opening. All of a sudden, the public could understand the issue and have compassion for the people getting hurt, and thanks to that, the door opened in terms of having those industry conversations.
Pffft—disappointingly, not that much. Like I said, this is all a work-in-progress, but it does get dispiriting, new balance 574 that even with all of these well-documented stories of abuse, we’re still in a situation where the Model Alliance support line gets calls every single day. It can feel like we’re playing whack-a-mole—you bop one bad actor on the head and another one pops up. Until we start treating these as systemic problems, everything’s just fundamentally going to stay the same. And there’s probably less momentum towards that than there was three or four years ago, because these stories aren’t so much in the headlines anymore.
OK, there’s a great example of context changing everything. Carré literally wrote a book about her experiences, it was published 10 years ago, and no one paid attention. Now, post-#metoo, post Jeffrey Epstein, we’ve got the language to say, I’ve been trafficked. And for people to know what that means.
The whole thing started with calls to the MA support line—usually we’re dealing with callers on a case-by-case basis, but here it seemed like the right thing to do was to put these women in touch. And then, we’ve helped fly a few of them to Paris to give testimony as part of the criminal investigation, and in Carré’s case, we realized there was an opening for her to pursue a lawsuit. Ironically, she had been working with us on and off for years, she just hadn’t put it together. Which, again, just goes to show the evolving consciousness around these issues. And also that it takes time for people to wrap their minds around trauma. A lot of our work is about meeting people where they are, and just helping them understand their rights.
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