A FEMINIST HISTORY OF FASHION – WHO’S WHO

ROSE SCHNEIDERMAN

As a teen in the 1890s, Schneiderman worked in a Manhattan cap-making factory, where she soon began to organise her co-workers. She spent 24 years as president of the US national Women’s Trade Union League.

FRANCES PERKINS

The first female US cabinet member, Perkins was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s labour secretary and a chief architect of his laws protecting worker rights. Previously, in a role at the New York City Consumers League, she’d pushed for laws to limit women’s and children’s work hours. A first-hand witness to the 1911 Manhattan Triangle fire (she was having tea nearby when it happened), she later said that was “the day the New Deal was born”.

SARAH ZIFF

Ziff founded the Model Alliance in 2012, and is a tireless campaigner for fair working conditions for models. She’s kept the pressure on the fashion industry to develop stricter codes of practice to protect models at work, and successfully lobbied to extend laws protecting underage performers to the modelling world.

KALPONA AKTER

Akter heads up the Bangladesh Centre for Worker Solidarity. A feminist and passionate human rights campaigner, she is a former child labourer who began working in a garment factory at age 12. She was still a teenager when she was fired for standing up for her rights, and those of her colleagues. After the Rana Plaza disaster in April 2013, Akter led calls for brands to take responsibility.

ORSOLA DE CASTRO AND CARRY SOMERS

These London-based designers unleashed Fashion Revolution in 2014 on the first anniversary of Rana Plaza. Since then it’s become a global movement pushing for a more transparent, fairer fashion industry. The campaign encourages consumers to think of themselves as part of the fashion supply chain, be curious and to ask: “Who made my clothes?”

SOPHORN YANG

The president of the Cambodian Alliance of Trade Unions speaks out for her country’s approximately 700,000 garment workers, 85 per cent of whom are women. Almost all are internal immigrants. Disconnected from their families, they’re more vulnerable to exploitation, often live in crowded, factory-run dormitories and work long hours for very low wages. A former garment worker herself, Yang’s is a bold voice for change.