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Dark Side of Fashion

Fashion. Power.
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01 / More than meets the eye

The price of
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Runway spectacle. Brand empires. The people and stories left outside the frame. Explore fashion’s darker histories—from stolen ideas and counterfeit fortunes to exploitation behind the label.

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AI concept art inspired by The Rise and Fall of Gia Carangi: A Model's LamentAI concept artwork · not archival photography

Daily selection · Aug 28 UTC

Drugs, Sex & Model Abuse5/5 wildness

The Rise and Fall of Gia Carangi: A Model's Lament

Wilhelmina Models, Elite Model Management / 1980s

Gia Carangi's meteoric rise as the first notable supermodel is a tragic tale woven into the fabric of the 1980s fashion scene. After opening the gateway for models with androgynous looks, Carangi became a favorite of iconic photographers and brands, which celebrated her unique beauty. Yet, as her modeling career flourished, the shadows of addiction loomed larger. Her lifestyle of excess was marked by drug use that escalated from cocaine to heroin, often impacting her work. By 1982, the effects of her addiction were unignorable; during a photoshoot for Versace, she struggled to hide the deepening marks of her drug use, an overt indicator of her rapidly declining health and professional credibility. This culminated in her final shoot in Tunisia, where she was sent home prematurely for being under the influence. The facade of starlet glamor crumbled as friends distanced themselves, leaving her isolated in her addiction until her heartbreaking fall was complete, ultimately taking her life and leaving no one from the fashion world in attendance at her funeral.

Archive: verified

03 / The fashion archive

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1506 stories

1506 stories in this selection.

01

Designer Scandals & Falls from Grace2020s

Ahlers AG and Pierre Cardin

In 2024, the European Commission imposed a combined fine of €5.7 million on Ahlers and Pierre Cardin over anticompetitive agreements dating from 2008 to 2011. According to the Commission’s findings, the arrangements were designed to protect Ahlers from competition in European countries where it held a Pierre Cardin license. Rather than allowing licensed Pierre Cardin clothing to circulate freely throughout the European market, the agreements allegedly restricted cross-border sales and helped preserve Ahlers’ privileged position in selected territories. The penalty arrived as Ahlers was already in severe financial decline: the company filed for insolvency in April 2023, and the Röther Group subsequently acquired the Pierre Cardin, Baldessarini, Pioneer Jeans, and Pionier workwear brands while closing Ahlers’ stores and online shops and eliminating around 300 jobs. The fine therefore became part of a broader collapse narrative in which a once-listed German menswear group faced both regulatory condemnation over market shielding and the dismantling of its traditional retail empire.

Archive: verified
02

Designer Scandals & Falls from Grace2020s

Esprit Holdings

Esprit, the lifestyle label founded in 1968 by Susie and Doug Tompkins and once valued at more than US$20 billion, suffered a dramatic reversal after years of declining market share and losses following the 2008 financial crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the retreat: stores were gradually closed across China, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Macau, while the company attempted a cautious revival under CEO William Pak. Although Esprit reported a $48.5 million profit on $1 billion in revenue in 2022 and pursued a renewed New York presence in 2023, the recovery did not stabilize its European operations. The Swiss franchise filed for bankruptcy in March 2024, the Belgian franchise followed in April with the expected closure of 15 company-operated stores and the loss of 148 jobs, and Esprit's European operations entered administration for the second time in four years in May, affecting approximately 1,500 employees. Danish operations filed for bankruptcy in June, the Dutch unit collapsed in July, and the U.S. business filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in October 2024. The sequence exposed the vulnerability of a once-globally prominent fashion label whose expansion, retail overhead, and fractured regional structure could not withstand prolonged changes in consumer behavior and the post-pandemic retail environment.

Archive: verified
03

Plagiarism & Stolen Heritage1960s

Yves Saint Laurent, Michèle Rosier, John Kloss, and mass-market dress manufacturers

Yves Saint Laurent's celebrated 1965 Mondrian Collection was presented as a sophisticated fusion of haute couture and modernist painting. Its six wool-jersey and silk A-line dresses used separately cut pieces of white and primary-colored fabric, joined by precise black seam lines that echoed Piet Mondrian's De Stijl compositions. The apparent simplicity concealed labor-intensive couture construction, developed with assistance from Azzedine Alaïa, and the dresses became emblematic of the moment when high fashion began treating the garment as a graphic canvas rather than a heavily ornamented total look. Their appearance on fashion-magazine pages, including a 1965 Vogue cover, transformed the collection into an instant commercial phenomenon. The success also exposed how vulnerable couture ideas were to imitation. A New York reporter noted that Saint Laurent's designs closely resembled two-color jersey dresses already created and widely sold by French designer Michèle Rosier, while The New York Times argued that American designer John Kloss had achieved a comparable effect as early as 1963. After the collection became famous, mass manufacturers produced cheaper Mondrian-style copies that circulated widely, stripping away the exclusivity and painstaking construction of the originals. The episode was not recorded as a definitive courtroom plagiarism ruling, but it became an important example of fashion's porous boundary between artistic homage, prior design precedent, and commercial copying. Saint Laurent reportedly grew so disenchanted by the flood of imitations that he eventually said, 'I hate Mondrian now.'

Archive: verified
04

Plagiarism & Stolen Heritage1840s

John Sobieski Stuart and Charles Edward Stuart

The brothers’ most consequential deception was not merely genealogical but sartorial. In 1842 they published Vestiarium Scoticum, an expensive, lavishly illustrated volume that purported to reproduce an ancient manuscript of Scottish clan tartans supposedly dating to 1571 and transmitted through Prince Charles Edward Stuart. They followed it with The Costume of the Clans in 1845. The books presented a romantic, highly systematized vision of tartan identity at precisely the moment when Victorian Scotland was turning Highland dress into a powerful commercial and cultural industry. Sir Walter Scott had already warned that the brothers were men of “warm imaginations” with “little probity” in antiquarian matters, and, after examining a transcript of their manuscript, reportedly declared from its language that the document itself was fabricated. Later historian Hugh Trevor-Roper described the publications as being “shot through with pure fantasy and bare faced forgery.” Despite those warnings, the works became widely used sources for the tartan trade, allowing alleged inventions to harden into accepted clan tradition and leaving a lasting imprint on Scottish costume, heritage marketing, and popular ideas of Highland identity.

Myth / folklore
05

Sweatshops & Labor Exploitation1940s

Obere Nähstube (Upper Tailoring Studio), Auschwitz; Hedwig Höss

Inside Auschwitz, clothing production became part of the camp's brutal hierarchy. Hedwig Höss, wife of the Nazi commandant, used female prisoners as workers in a fashion salon known as the Obere Nähstube, or Upper Tailoring Studio. Marta Fuchs, Berta Berkovich Kohut, and other young women were forced to design and tailor high-fashion garments for elite Nazi women. Their sewing skills offered a narrowly defined chance of survival within the concentration-camp system, but the work remained coerced labor conducted under conditions of imprisonment, terror, and mass persecution. The contrast was grotesque: garments associated with privilege and social display were produced by women whose own freedom, safety, and families had been destroyed by the regime that benefited from their labor. The story exposes how Nazi power extended even into the intimate world of women's dress, converting prisoners' craftsmanship into a luxury service for the ruling elite. Adlington's research grew from her earlier fictional account, The Red Ribbon (2017), after descendants of some of the dressmakers contacted her with additional information. Her subsequent factual book, The Dressmakers of Auschwitz (2021), brought the women's experiences to a wide international audience, helping preserve their names and documenting a largely overlooked intersection of fashion, forced labor, and Holocaust history.

Archive: verified
06

Designer Scandals & Falls from Grace1560s

Bastian Pagez, Mary, Queen of Scots, and the Scottish Court

Bastian Pagez's courtly prestige became entangled with one of the darkest episodes in Tudor-Stuart political history. On 9 February 1567, Mary, Queen of Scots attended a banquet and wedding masque for Bastian and Christily Hogg. She had given Christily black satin for her marriage gown the previous day, and contemporary accounts described the queen joining the dance and participating in the custom of putting the bride to bed. According to later reports, Mary may have worn male clothing during such masked entertainments, reinforcing the enduring image of a torchlit, disguise-filled court moving through Edinburgh on the eve of Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley's murder at Kirk o' Field.

Archive: verified
Showing 1–6 of 1506

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From the Fashion archive

U.S. apparel manufacturing contractors / 1990s

The 1990s Race to the Bottom and the $12.5 Million Wage Recovery

Sweatshops & Labor ExploitationArchive: verified4/5 wildness

By the late twentieth century, the apparel industry had entered a global cost war. Mega-retailers and consumers demanded lower prices, while free-trade policies and increasingly mobile supply chains allowed manufacturers to move production toward countries with cheaper labor and weaker enforcement. Between 1970 and 1995, U.S. garment employment fell from 1.2 million workers to 760,000, while hundreds of thousands of jobs shifted into developing Asian economies. The pressure was not merely theoretical: between 1993 and 1997, the U.S. Department of Labor, under Secretary Robert Reich, recovered $12.5 million in back wages owed to more than 40,000 workers. In 1996, President Bill Clinton created the White House Apparel Industry Partnership in an attempt to address sweatshop abuses. The episode showed how subcontracting could separate famous retail labels from the factories actually responsible for wage theft, while leaving workers to pursue money through slow investigations and difficult legal remedies.

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Status and citations are supplied by the archive. AI concept art is an interpretation, not historical evidence.