Fashion Journalism

I'm an author and journalist who has been investigating the collision of capitalism and fashion since 2010.

I write about: worker’s rights, environmentalism, sustainable fashion, fashion consumption globalisation and gendered, racialised, class-based exploitation in factories and across supply chains.

How I can help you with your investigations or getting started in fashion journalism:

• I teach Supply Chain Journalism and Information Security at the Centre for Investigative Journalism. To see my upcoming courses click here.
• I have a free newsletter which you can find here.
• You can check out a selection of my work - articles, reports and documentaries below:

Portfolio

My photography has been featured in news outlets including The i Paper and the Guardian. Click here for a selection of my photojournalism.

• War On Want and Research & Degrowth report - Extraction Fashion: unequal exchange and degrowth explored
• ECO AGE: Nepal: The Front Line of the Fast Fashion Crisis
• Resistance by Steve McQueen - Essay published in this wonderful book.
• War On Want report - Fashioning the future - Fixing the fashion industry for workers and climate

• Sunny VK Show podcast on how to understand capitalism through fashion, to racialised violence in the industry and how much I truly despise Gabrielle 'Coco' Chanel.
• One Planet podcast on Global Green New Deal, solidarity and shutting down social media feeds.
• Social Policy Worldwide Women workers transform Tamil Nadu factories in fight against gender-based violence - on the impact of The Dindigul Agreement
• Pluto Press book talk with Can fashion be anti-capitalist? with Yara Rodrigues Fowler
• XR Writers Rebel Un-fashioning The Future
• openDemocracy Heat stress fears for migrant workers persist ahead of Qatar World Cup
• openDemocracy Can urban mining help to save the planet?
• openDemocracy Violence against women garment workers increased during pandemic
• JOURNO COLECTIVO PROJECT: MAPPING THE COVID RIGHTS ROLL BACK IN THE RMG SECTOR A cross-border collaboration and a National Geographic Society funded project. Articles published in English and Spanish:

Capital & Main: Can California’s New Garment Worker Law Rein in Abuses?

Dhaka Tribune: How the West’s thirst for fast fashion is destroying lives

Jacobin Magazine: Work and Death in Sri Lanka’s Garment Industry

Underground. Periodismo Internacional: Pandemia, abuso laboral en la industria textil (Pandemic labour abuse in the textile industry)

openDemocracy: Report says soldiers shot three dead at Myanmar factory making US cowboy boots

Contra Corriente: Personas enfermas por trabajo en maquila fueron despedidas con la excusa de la pandemia (People sick from maquila work were fired with the pandemic as the excuse) -

• Winner of the Freelance Fashion & Beauty Writer Award at the inaugural Freelance Writing Awards. (June 2021)
• Completed Carbon Literacy for Journalists training. Certified Carbon Literate by the Carbon Literacy Project. (Feb 2022)
• TRIBUNE: The Fashion Debt Trap (March 2021)
• JOMEC: Cardiff University Lecture on supply chain journalism
• openDemocracy: “They left us starving”: How the fashion industry abandoned its workers (Jan 2021)
• BBC World Service: Protest Fashion: A Political Fashion Look Book (Jan 2021)
• HUCK MAGAZINE: We should all care what happens to Julian Assange (Jan 2021)
• openDemocracy: Behind the shine: how the jewellery trade relies on minerals tainted with death (Dec 2020)
• HuffPost: What Actually Happens To Your Online Returns? (Dec 2020)
• Verso Books: Bleak Friday (Nov 2020)
• Nominated for a British Journalism Award. Investigations category as part of the openDemocracy team portfolio (Nov 2020)
• Riversmeet: We Need to Talk about Shoes (Nov 2020)
• Guardian: 'Thrown to the wolves': how Covid-19 laws are being used to silence garment workers (October 2020)

• Foot Work author appearance at Appledore Book Festival (September 2020)
• Resurgence Magazine: Think On Your Feet (September 2020)
• Foot Work - Fashion Talks Book Club (September 2020)
• German speaking tour (virtual): Hamburg, Munster, Berlin
• Guardian: Covid outbreak exposes dire conditions at Guatemala factory making US brands (August 2020)
• New Internationalist: CAN WORKERS RESET THE SYSTEM? (July 2020)
• HUCK MAG Garment workers or fashion corporations? It’s time to pick a side (June 2020)
• Fashion Roundtable: OP-ED: People in Primark are not your enemy (June 2020)
• Restart project podcast: Shoes & Urgent System Change (June 2020)
• York Festival Of Ideas: Foot Work: What your shoes are doing to the world (June 2020)
• HUCK MAG: Corporations or garment workers? It’s time to pick a side (June 2020)
• openDemocracy: 'Useless' Deloitte accused of PPE failings amid COVID-19 deal secrecy (May 2020)
• Public Reading Rooms: Foot Work - What your shoes are doing to the world (May 2020)
• Fashion Roundtable: OP-ED Hypebeast" culture is creating an environmental disaster (April 2020)
• Rana Plaza Anniversary: UDITA film screening and Q&A (April 2020)
• HUCK MAG: Fast fashion hasn’t stopped putting profits over people (March 2020)
• Guardian ‘Some soles last 1,000 years in landfill’: the truth about the sneaker mountain (March 2020 - exclusive rights to Foot Work bought by the Guardian who printed an edited extract in the Weekend Magazine)

SELECTED ARCHIVE

2020 - 2014

My Top Picks:

• The i Paper: 'We're not humans any more': inside the strike at warehouse that supplies Topshop
• Al Jazeera: Westgate: Kenyan guards on the frontline
• Al Jazeera: Seeking justice for deadly Pakistan factory blaze
• Guardian: Reliving the Rana Plaza factory collapse: a history of cities in 50 buildings, day 22
• Guardian: No individual black model on cover of British Vogue since 2002
• Guardian: Old Dhaka in danger: young volunteers bid to save historic city from developers
• The i Paper: 'A Prayer Before Dawn' author Billy Moore on his time in a Thai prison (interview done inside Liverpool Prison)

• THE TRUE COST: Trailer here
• Guardian: Made in Britain: UK textile workers earning £3 per hour
• Guardian: H&M, Zara and Marks & Spencer linked to polluting viscose factories in Asia
• Guardian: Opinion Stella McCartney’s fake-fur coats are worlds away from the brutal fur trade
• Guardian: Robot factories could threaten jobs of millions of garment workers
• Guardian: Supply chain audits fail to detect abuses, says report
• Guardian: Shop until you drop: Black Friday and the call for longer opening hours
• Guardian: A cruelty-free angora fur trade may be incompatible with fast fashion
• Guardian: How the Jack the Ripper industry distorts London's East End
• Guardian: After two years, the Rana Plaza fund finally reaches its $30m target
• Guardian: Rana Plaza: are fashion brands responsible for those they don't directly employ?
• Guardian: Fashion industry is letting down people with disabilities - to its cost
• Guardian: Ethical fashion: saving South Africa’s clothing industry
• Guardian: Luxury brands: higher standards or just a higher mark-up?
• Guardian: The feminist T-shirt scandal exposes an entire system of exploitation
• Guardian: Role of business in disappearance of 50% of world's wildlife
• Guardian: Cotton production linked to images of the dried up Aral Sea basin
• Guardian: If we care about employee wellbeing, zero-hour contracts must go

• iD/Vice: UK police raid 280 nail salons in crackdown on modern slavery
• iD: in bangladesh, the people who make your clothes are striking for their rights | read | i-D
• iD: how do we ensure fashion’s diversity drive doesn’t just fetishise the new wave of models?
• iD: Op-Ed - we must keep pressure on brands to protect garment workers
• Business of Fashion: Preventing Another Rana Plaza
• Business of Fashion: Op-Ed | The Trouble with Second-Hand Clothes
• Business of Fashion: Op-Ed | Garment Workers Deserve a Global Minimum Wage
• The i Paper: The story of Billy Moore’s time in a brutal Thai prison is now a movie, but he won’t see it – because he’s back in jail
• Independent: I challenged Germaine Greer over her transphobic comments this week. Here's what happened
• Independent: Corbyn has been drawing 1,000-strong crowds in ex-mining communities - but they're poor, so it doesn't matter