Fashion's Victims: An Artist's Focus On Garment Workers

On Madrid's posh Gran Vía, thousands of shoppers and tourists visit the flagship stores of some of the biggest names in European fast fashion — Zara, Mango and H&M.

Suddenly, the hordes of bargain-hunters stop dead in their tracks.

Face down on the sidewalk lie the bodies of three women, buried in rubble. Silver stilettos protrude from underneath cement dust and cardboard. Designer handbags and sunglasses rest next to their lifeless hands.

Tourists gasp. A crowd forms. An off-duty nurse rushes to crouch over one of the bodies. Others call 911 or take photos. And one woman hangs back, observing from afar.

She's the Spanish artist Yolanda Dominguez, and the women sprawled on the sidewalk are alive and well. They're models — part of Dominguez' latest art installation, Fashion Victims, meant to conjure images of the Rana Plaza garment factory collapse in Bangladesh.

"The real fashion victims are not celebrities, but anonymous workers in poor conditions, in polluted countries," Dominguez, 36, told NPR afterward. "The images I saw [from Bangladesh] in the media of the limbs of the dead people under the rubble struck me so much, and I wanted to reproduce them."

Worker Safety

At least 1,129 people died when the Rana Plaza factory collapsed outside the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, on April 24. The accident is believed to be the deadliest in the garment industry's history, and reverberations are being felt as far away as Spain — home to some of the world's biggest low-cost fashion retailers.

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