Enslaving children and torturing dissidents is never chic.
The daughter of Uzbekistan’s dictator planned to unveil her spring fashion line at New York City’s prestigious Fashion Week. But her show was canceled after Human Rights Watch and a coalition of like-minded organizations spotlighted her connection to her father’s tyrannical government.
Gulnara Karimova isn’t just the eldest daughter of Islam Karimov – Uzbekistan’s autocratic leader since the Soviet era – she also serves as the government’s ambassador to Spain and the United Nations, a high-level position in a regime known for imprisoning and torturing political opponents and rights activists. Her father’s government forces up to two million Uzbek children to leave school for two months each year to pick cotton – a fabric woven throughout Karimova’s designs.
Karimova maintains a jet-setter lifestyle, which includes making a pop video with Julio Iglesias and launching her fashion line “Guli.” But according to a cable released by Wikileaks, US diplomats said most Uzbeks view her as “a greedy, power-hungry individual who uses her father to crush business people or anyone else who stands in her way.”
To get her Fashion Week show canceled, Human Rights Watch reached out to senior management at IMG, the event organizer, and Fashion Week’s main sponsors, like Mercedes-Benz – providing examples of the abuses that our Uzbekistan researchers documented on the ground.
As the pressure grew, IMG canceled her Fashion Week show.
Human Rights Watch is now working with IMG and the event’s sponsors, urging them to better vet their potential participants so that abusers don’t have Fashion Week as a platform.
It’s fitting that Fashion Week won’t showcase a designer who represents such a repressive government. It sends a strong message: abusers shouldn’t be allowed to launder their image at the expense of human rights.
Read more here.
No comments:
Post a Comment