by Bobbin.Threadbare » Sun Nov 13, 2016 7:43 am
Hi all - not sure where else to post this so it's going here. I'm going to be off here for a while, maybe for good and I deleted my slack account yesterday too. I have been getting emails either from a troll or someone who truly believes my work with Story is 'exploitative' (culturally, sexually, morally). The emails have cited both CT and slack and while I don't feel like the answer is in stopping anything I do I don't particularly want to keep an open channel or feel watched.
One last time here, just for the record - Story is as much a social outreach programme as it is a brand. We support poor and abused women through an embroidery initiative, we are part of a movement trying to clean up the garment industry and we pay excellent wages. We do not culturally appropriate, we work with craftspeople and create new designs. We are closing our loop to be as vertical as possible and there is nothing secretive about our work. For our lookbooks we work with customers who elect to be in the shoots and do not discriminate based on age or race. Shooting lookbooks is expensive and time consuming (at a time between a collection being finished and going off to show) so we cannot always guarantee that a range of people representative of all cultures can be present in the few that we have done. We shoot these lookbooks in London, generally, and not in the countries we make the fabric simply because we are in London at that time, and in any case we choose location based on the story of the collection not the origin of the fabric, thread, branding etc.
We are a two person team, Katy and I, and we have no employees.