H&M Child Labour Video Turns Out To Be Hoax
A video that purported to be from inside an Indian factory where H&M was producing their sell-out collaboration line with Alexander Wang, featuring child workers, has turned out to be a hoax – probably.
The video, which was posted by two German fashion journalists on the eccentric, hard-partying site Dandy Diary, showed kids sewing WANG labels onto garments inside an Indian garment factory.
The video ended with a young boy quoting Wang himself, saying “I am honoured to be part of H&M’s designer collaborations.”
It rapidly went viral, and commentators were up in arms – but H&M stepped in to slam the filmmakers and the film itself.
“The video in question is fake,” H&M told Vogue. “The factory is not an H&M supplier. The Alexander Wang for H&M collection has been produced in China, Turkey and Italy only and not in India. The labels used for this collection are entirely black and not black on white as shown in the video.”
It went further, angrily adding, “H&M does not accept child labour. Our child labour policy is based on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the International Labour Organisation.”
So what’s the real story on the Dandy Diary boys and what they were hoping to achieve with the fake video?
H&M has publicly committed to treating their workers fairly: after the death of 1129 workers in a factory collapse in Bangladesh (who were not working for H&M), the retailer, which also owns & Other Stories and COS, pledged living wages for its workers, and expressed anger that governments were preventing wider change.
The Dandy Diary twosome, Dave and Jakob, originally posted the video as an ‘homage’ to H&M, which they called the ‘Swedish junk giant’.
They later called it a ‘commercial’, and they said that it had been “banned, deleted, banned, and chased out of the city.” They haven’t released any further statement about whether the situation is genuine, or what they were trying to do – probably because H&M’s lawyers came down on them like a tonne of bricks.
If it’s an art piece that’s meant to illustrate the dirty practises behind a lot of cheap clothing, it’s an effective one – but why did they pretend it was real? If it was just a ploy to get their blog many more hits in 24 hours, they certainly achieved it.
The situation may lead to H&M taking the blog to court – in which case they’d have to explain themselves in full. But H&M probably doesn’t want the defence lawyers pointing out that they have had trouble with allegations of child labour before.
What do you think: real or a strange hoax?
Image: Dandy Diary’s H&M video.
