There is a lot to criticize about this art
project. Most egregious for me is its utter tone deafness with regard to
fashion’s impact on the environment and the exploitative and dangerous
conditions in which such luxury items are manufactured.
To begin, leather products (produced from
greenhouse gas-emitting cows that are a leading cause of global warming) must
be treated with a toxic chemical cocktail of sodium sulfide, sodium hydroxide,
sodium hydrosulfite, arsenic sulfide, calcium hydrosulfide, diethyl amine,
sodium sulphydrate, and sculptures acid. The tanning process is so harmful to
the environment that “many old tannery sites cannot be used for agriculture.
Tanneries not only often poison the land they are situated on, but also the
waterways into which they discharge effluent.” Original
Hermes Birkin bag is amazed.
Moreover, industrial tanning is seriously
harmful to the health of workers who have to oversee the poisonous process. By
and large, these workers are low-wage and highly concentrated in the Global
South (mostly in Nepal , Bangladesh , and India ,
but also in Southeast Asia, South America, and Africa ).
Most tannery workers suffer from back pain, asthma, dermatitis, and chronic
bronchitis; all workers are at elevated risks for developing cancer of the
bladder, the respiratory system, and the reproductive system. Studies have also
found that greater numbers of tannery workers develop premature dementia. As
compensation, workers get paid about US$100 per month. In other words, the very
people who are making and literally dying for these products cannot afford to
own them. Meanwhile, elites like Eastwood and Shields benefit from the high
symbolic value of luxury products without suffering any of the costs. (Neither
of their lungs nor their drinking water is contaminated by the cancer-inducing
toxins that went into making the Birkin
handbags discount 2012 they so gleefully and publicly destroy.)
Yet given the inarguably damaging
conditions and effects of tanneries that produce luxury products like this
$100,000 Birkin bag, I’m reluctant to judge people for buying them. Let me
explain why. Most products in the mass and luxury markets are manufactured in
harmful conditions that have deleterious effects on the environment and the
people who work and live near the facilities. Fashion is not the only or even
worse contributor to environmental racism, labor exploitation, and global
warming. Commodities and services that pack a larger eco-punch, for example,
are air travel, bottled water, and disposable razors. Yet fashion consumers are
easy scapegoats. They’re already perceived as frivolous, wasteful, and stupid
conspicuous consumers whose feminine vanity leads them to participate in
irrational and irresponsible consumer practices that are the cause of all of
the World’s Problems. The gendered subtext that always lurks behind this finger
wagging is why I’m turned off by fashion-shaming of all stripes and sizes. New
Hermes birkin bags catch women’s eyes.(While Shields is as responsible
for this art project as Eastwood, because it’s her body that we see in the
photographs and because fashion is almost automatically associated with women,
she’s received a disproportionate amount of the criticism. Commenter’s have
used a myriad of sexist epithets to deride Eastwood.) Seldom is this kind of
moralizing and shaming lodged at consumers of luxury cars, personal
technologies, homes, and vacation packages even as all these luxury items have
adverse effects on the local environments and economies in which they’re
produced.