Photo-Text-Collage
Over 90% of the clothes in German fashion stores are imported. Retailers such as H&M, Mango, New Yorker and Zara produce their collections in countries like China, Bangladesh, India, Cambodia, Morocco and Turkey. Minimum wages, which are not enough to make a living from, are just one dimension of the massive violations of workers‘ and human rights in the factories producing the garments. It is mostly young women who are facing them. „beyond fashion“ thematizes the dark side of the globalised fashion industry. Woman workers‘ own words on the labour conditions in these factories were used to inspire the staging of different garments produced by those named brands. Imitating the companies‘ advertising imagery, the work aims to address the viewer as a consumer of these items and to shed light on those who are paying the price in the global „Fast Fashion“-business. (Susanne A. Friedel)