So I was not going to post on this, but it has been blowing up all over the internet. This has been the source of a lot of drama and outrage for the past few days/weeks. It’s the M.A.C. collaboration with Rodarte that is coming out in mid-September. I’m going keep it brief here as many, many people have gone into this issue in depth. I’ll post links of some of the articles. I think it’s important to know about this especially since there has been a reaction from M.A.C.  So here goes…

M.A.C. usually does a couple of collaborations a year with designer – they’ve done DSquared, Emmanuel Ungaro, Alexander Mc Queen to name a few. This time around, they chose the design duo from Rodarte and created a collection based on their Fall/Winter ’10 offering. The ladies from Rodarte stated that they were inspired by a road trip they had taken through Texas.  It would have been all fine and dandy except the centre of their inspiration is the notorious border town of Juarez.  If you have never heard of Juarez, its a town on the Mexico side of the US-Mexico border where people are severely impovrished and women are brutalized.  There seems to be no law and most cases remain unsolved.  Google it.  It’s not a good story and Rodarte was apparently draw to the clothing of the female factory workers. Uhmm….right.

Then the images and the names of the products in the line came out and all hell broke loose! Folks were infuriated and quite rightly so, there were items called ‘Ghost Town’ and ‘Juarez’ and the main promo image was of the deathly pale female with darkened eyes, made to look dead.  People have been all over YouTube, Twitter, the blogosphere decrying and demanding that M.A.C. pull the collection.  So much so, after days of badgering, M.A.C. sent out a statement staying that they were going to rename the collection and donate some money to a charity in Juarez.

Continue reading