The relevance of this book is surprisingly deceptive. It's choice bits of right on target political, social, and especially environmental commentary are carefully camouflaged within the text. What starts out as a rather mundane discourse on the vacuous values of shopping, packaged to appeal to your average Hamptonite sensibilities, suddenly turns dead serious, dedicating the last three chapters to sweatshops, the ecological consequences of dry cleaning, and the use of fur.

The author found a stealth way to butter up her captive reading audience, commonly addicted to style over substance, so as to give them a refreshing dose of unexpected reality. Michelle's book is in other words, a dirty trick and a wake-up call to the complacent.

I love this book. Michelle was born to write for Lü. Check out her website:
http://www.michelleklee.com
which I hope will grow beyond simple support for her book.

Remy C.

Fashion Victim

Michelle Lee
This from a Q&A:

[[ Do you see any end in sight for sweatshops?]]

"Unfortunately, no. It's really a symptom of the living conditions in other countries. People are desperate for work, especially in poor Asian nations. I mean, when you're given the option of working 18 hours a day for pennies or not working at all and not having food for your family, there's really no decision to be made. And as long as consumers have a demand for lots of fast trends and as long as we create this competition among manufacturers, sweatshops will exist. And there are a lot of unscrupulous people out there who are willing to take advantage of people. Experts that I interviewed explained to me that the modern sweatshop isn't necessarily what we tend to think of when we think of a sweatshop. In other words, it may not be the rat-infested, low-lit, dingy factory we would think of, but rather, it could look fine and have other less noticeable problems like wage violations."

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