The new Mac Autumn 2010 collaboration with Rodarte is "inspired" by a trip that Laura and Kate Mulleavy took from El Paso to Marfa and the etheral landscape and impoverished factory workers floating to work at dawn in a sleepy, dreamlike state (quote from here)
The collection includes names such as Ghost Town, Sleepless, Pale, Sleepwalker, Whitegold, Badlands, Factory and Juarez. Even vaguely knowing the inspiration of this collection makes the names seem a little well, awful, to be honest. However, once you start to look in a bit more detail it gets worse.
The collection itself features a very pale colour palette - it's certainly not aimed at women of colour (who primarily dominate the places that inspired the very collection).
The worst bit? The Juarez nail polish - Juarez is a factory town which is notorious of the rapes (and murders) of girls and women from 12-22 which saw very little and in some cases, no police involvement at all.
Now of course, there'll be the people who point out that MAC are donating a portion of their profits to charity. However, I have 2 issues with that - firstly, it's only a portion. For a collection based around such exploitation and appalling circumstances, all of the profits should be going to charity. Secondly, the donation only came about as a result of a big league blogger posting their disgust.
Personally I think that 100% of the proceeds should be going to charity and that MAC should be seriously thinking about how they design and collaboration in the future.Personally, I'll be boycotting the whole thing.
Links:
Temptalia
Oh Industry
Ny Mag
Threadbared
The Frisky
ontd_feminism
Amnesty International
Blogs:
Le Petit Jardin De Liloo
London Beauty Queen
London Makeup Girl
So Far So Chic
Sparkle and Shade
Vex In The City
Wande's World
(I didn't get an email with the links, so this list was taken from Lillian Lows blog - hope you don't mind lovely Lillian)
Its great to see such passion over this issue - I have written a post too on www.mizzworthy.com and would love your comments there. I actually think the awareness raised by this could have actually been done by MAC themselves, instead of fobbing us off with a wishy washy after thought of a promise to donate a "portion" of profits - not good enough.
ReplyDeletespent all night reading all these blog posts! yours is very well written too, im so pleased we are all raising awareness on this topic! I find the images so creepy :(
ReplyDeleteyou can read my view here:
http://bit.ly/baiPm6
www.perfectly-polished-nails.com
X
I won't buy a damn thing from this line. It's disgusting that they would even go through with it. I hope more people will be informed on what this collection actually is about and realize what a load of BS it is!
ReplyDeleteThat's disgusting. I read the article you likned to - MAC seems to want a clap on the back for dressing up models in a romantic imitation of poverty to flog products. They're just hoping to sell more by adding a charity tag to the price - and they could certainly afford to donate much more than they will through proceeds from the sales. And those products should be renamed. Thanks for the post!
ReplyDelete