The Hidden Price of Luxury
Prestige at the top, rotten foundations beneath. Iain Overton examines how fragmented supply chains allow labour abuses while offering 'plausible deniability' to luxury brands
We sat under an unrelenting sky. The birds had long since sought shade from the noonday glare, but the man said his bones hurt and he wanted to stay warm in the sun. He was a slave, his mouth full of broken teeth and hard words.
His story was not new in this place, long forsaken. A landowner had come to collect a debt after a card game went bad for this sad‑faced man. The 40 year old had never been lucky at cards. He had never been lucky in love or in life either, he said.
The landowner, with men who had guns, told him he must repay. He would get food for his work as a cattle herder, and he would work until the debt was paid. Or there would be a reckoning.
That was seven years ago. The man no longer knew how much he owed. The edge of the farm was too far to walk to freedom. So here he stayed. And here, he said, he would stay.
His words were heavy enough, but I had not come only to find slaves. I had come to see the cattle they tended, too. I had heard that the hides from the steers on this flea‑blown farm in Ceará, in north‑east Brazil, went to a nearby tannery, and then to Italian sweatshops staffed by Chinese migrant workers, and from there to line the seats of luxury cars in Northern European manufacturing hubs.
What began as slavery ended as desirability. At least, that was the investigative arc we were trying to establish. We interviewed the man, visited the tannery, and slipped into the Italian workshops. But when we took the story to broadcasters, saying we had uncovered a dark trade, they wanted more.
Proof that this specific cow, watched by this specific slave, had been slaughtered, its hide treated in that tannery, and that very hide stitched by underpaid Chinese workers, all in moments that we would be able to film. They wanted proof that the path from cow to carcass to cured hide to car seat could be traced without a single break. Their lawyers insisted on it.
We could not do this. The supply chain was too fragmented. It would have meant infiltrating every link and that would have taken years. And so, despite the patterns of abuse being unmistakable, we ditched the investigation.
And this was not my first frustration in trying to link abuse to luxury.
As part of another project, I had spent months trying to infiltrate a major Chinese factory making high‑end handbags – household names that could burn a hole in a bank account. Our undercover seamstress filmed hazardous conditions: crowded dormitories, filthy toilets, rats, long and punishing hours. Strikes had been repressed with tear gas.
The commissioning editor wanted the evidence watertight. We went back a second time. Everything had changed. The dormitories were thinned out, the toilets cleaned, safety protocols were in place. It was never clear what had happened, but a month later the top‑end British luxury goods company we sought to report on quietly stopped using that factory. It was almost as if they knew that we had been there.
This is the fundamental problem of exposing the supply chain: it is designed to hide its own shame. As Paul Roeland, an expert at the ‘Clean Clothes Campaign’ told the BBC in April, “the luxury sector had been very resistant towards opening up their supply chains”.
But even where journalism has faltered, the courts have begun to probe what broadcasters would not touch. In Brazil, prosecutors have launched a landmark case against Volkswagen, alleging that its Amazon cattle ranch once relied on systemic forced labour and human trafficking to supply the global leather trade (Volkswagen do Brasil say they no longer get their leather from Brazil and they are fully committed to universal human rights and comply with all labour laws).
Meanwhile, Italy’s most celebrated luxury brands are facing uncomfortable scrutiny as Milanese prosecutors peel back the “Made in Italy” label. Their investigations have revealed a supply chain less about artisanal heritage than about subcontracting, cost‑cutting and invisible migrant labour.
Loro Piana, a century‑old cashmere house now owned by LVMH, was placed under 12‑month judicial administration after police raids uncovered jackets retailing for over €3,000 being made in illegal workshops on the outskirts of Milan for as little as €118. Ten Chinese workers, five of them undocumented, were reported to be working up to 90 hours a week for €4 an hour. The brand has not been criminally charged and said it cut ties with the supplier immediately. It claims it “firmly condemns any illegal practices and reaffirms its unwavering commitment to upholding human rights and compliance with all applicable regulations throughout its supply chain.”
But Bloomberg reported in March 2024 that Loro Piana, the luxury fashion house known for its $9,000 vicuña wool sweaters, sources its prized fibre from indigenous communities in the Peruvian Andes. Despite relying on these communities for decades, many local workers reportedly receive no compensation for their labour. In 2018, a Peruvian Government study found 80% of those living in a major production town said they hadn’t profited from the trade. Instead, payment is left to informal community systems, with no direct oversight from the company. It’s a gap that has raised concerns about labour exploitation at the base of the supply chain. Again, Loro Piana denies any wrongdoing.
But Piana is not alone in its scandals. It is the fifth fashion house in the past 18 months to be placed under court administration in Italy over labour abuses. Italian police have reportedly found that Armani handbags selling for €1,800 were produced by a Chinese subcontractor for €93 and sold to the group via an intermediary for €250. A Dior subsidiary, according to Reuters, paid as little as €53 for bags that retailed at €2,600.
Some argue that these fragmented supply chains offer plausible deniability for luxury brands, and that abuse flourishes in this distance. Each link keeps itself at arm’s length: the seamstress stitching a handbag never sees the conditions in which the animal under their needle was raised; the marketing executive never smells the abattoir; the shopper never imagines child-mined rare earth metals lurk behind the shine of a watch.
Each stage shields the flagship store in Paris from the 90-hour week and the stench of bones and glue. Prosecutors now call this a design, not a flaw; a system built to cut costs while preserving the illusion of ethical craft. As one recent industry critique put it, “If ‘Made in Italy’ is still supposed to mean artisanal craft, heritage and quality, why does it now so often mean silence, sleight of hand, and subcontracted abuse?” And it has left Vogue Business opining in a July 2025 piece: ‘Can luxury ever guarantee clean supply chains?’.
But perhaps this is just the end-game logic of late capitalism playing out, for the scale of the problem seems universal. According to the Swiss Business & Human Rights Resource Centre’s 2023 KnowTheChain benchmark, which assessed 65 of the world’s largest apparel and footwear firms, the industry averaged a pitiful score of 14 out of 100 on preventing and remedying risks to migrant workers. Less than a quarter of companies engaged with unions to uphold basic rights. Nearly half faced allegations of forced labour.
In the fashion hierarchy of late capitalism, prestige gleams at the top while the foundation rots beneath. Despite layers of audits, ethical pledges, and endless assurances, these mechanisms appear all too often to remain too slow and superficial to protect the workers whose labour sustains the industry’s luxury. Value flows upward, enriching those at the summit, while risk and hardship are pushed downward. Every intermediary and subcontractor acts as a shield, absorbing the human cost so the final brand can preserve its spotless image.
Social media completes the insulation. Instagram offers a gleaming feed of luxury unmoored from its origins: soft leather against polished marble, gold clasps catching the light, influencers in curated hotel rooms. The camera never strays to the slaughterhouse, the dormitory, or the dye‑stained floor of an illegal workshop.
Distance – geographic, emotional, and digital – is the industry’s greatest asset. The longer the chain, the easier it is for luxury to sell an illusion: that beauty can be clean, desire can be innocent, and the cost of indulgence is only counted in euros.
Of course, this is not new. As Dana Thomas says in her 2019 book Fashionopolis: “Fashion has been a dirty, unscrupulous business that has exploited humans and Earth alike to harvest bountiful profits. Slavery, child labour, and prison labour have all been integral parts of the supply chain at one time or another – including today.”
What is new is how persistently we pretend otherwise.
The story I began with, of a man under a seamless sky, tending cattle not for wages but survival, ought to shock. But it is no longer an anomaly. The same dynamics that underpin that forgotten ranch in Ceará course through the veins of global luxury and global capitalism alike. What begins in coercion and ends in opulence is not a chain at all, but a system. One purpose-built to obscure, to displace blame, and to ensure that the well-heeled buyer never has to ask where, or who, or how.
The industry will not change itself. Regulation remains toothless, consumer activism too disorganised. And so the question falls to us – not just as consumers, but as good humans: are we content to admire the surface while ignoring the rot beneath?
Because, perhaps, in the end, that is the true luxury being sold: not the product itself, but the comfort of never having to look too closely at our own complicity.
Read more of Iain Overton’s investigations into the business of luxury in the forthcoming print edition of Byline Times