PrettyLittleThing announced their partnership with Gemma Owen yesterday.
Brett Staniland, who competed on last year’s Love Island, has called out the fast-fashion retailer PrettyLittleThing for using the name, popularity and image of Indiyah Polack for engagement, and then offering a brand partnership to Gemma Owen.
Brett made the comments on an Instagram post by The Shade Borough, which contained screenshots of a post by PLT asking fans to retweet a picture if they think Indiyah would be “the perfect PLT Doll”. Another post asking fans to do the same for Gemma got significantly less retweets.
In the comments, Brett, who is an advocate for sustainable fashion, wrote: “OK so a while ago I said ‘they use women of colour in their campaigns to hide the exploitation of women of colour in their supply chains.’
“It makes the brand appear inclusive when in fact it’s purely exploitative. Now they’ve gone even further and are using (without any compensation) the image, name and popularity of a Black woman, to further the brands image with no intentions of rewarding or even acknowledging them. It’s honestly disgusting.”
On Twitter, he also commented on the matter, writing: “Fast fashion brands aren’t using influencers and celebrities as ambassadors to show working class or poor people somewhere affordable to shop.
“They use them to convince people who have the money, to massively over-consume impossibly cheap clothing.”
Let’s get one thing straight.
Fast fashion brands aren’t using influencers and celebrities as ambassadors to show working class or poor people somewhere affordable to shop.
They use them to convince people who have the money, to massively over-consume impossibly cheap clothing
— Dr Brett Staniland (@TwinBrett_) August 22, 2022
Brett has long been calling out the practices of fast-fashion, and earlier this year, he staged a protest outside fellow Love Island alumni Molly-Mae Hague’s fashion show for PrettyLittleThing.
Molly-Mae held the event at the Londoner Hotel where she showed off her latest collection. Alongside other protesters, Brett held a sign which read “There’s nothing pretty about wage theft.”
At the time, he told OK! Magazine: “The fashion industry doesn’t get taken seriously with the climate crisis. Boohoo Group don’t care about anyone, and they contribute more to the crisis than any other fashion brand in the UK.”
