In defence of Indian Vogue

The fashion industry often attracts criticism: models too young, models too thin, clothes too expensive... Today commentators from across the world are united in damning it - or rather Indian Vogue in particular - for using extremely poor people as models in a recent fashion shoot.

Emotive descriptions of toothless, lower-caste women with hollow-eyed children modelling fashions they can't possibly afford make for good copy.

But appalling? Exploitative? Hang on a minute. Do these critics really need to see things so juxtaposed to realise that, gosh, the world has really rich people in it and really poor ones. Did you need Vogue to point it out to you? Did you not think about it before you saw that baby modelling a Fendi bib, or a man holding a Burberry umbrella?

And anyway, how many of us can truly put

our hands up and say that what we're wearing, the food in our tummies from lunch or dinner, wasn't picked, packed or made by someone with no worker's rights?

Even the magazines we read may have been printed using what can best be described as 'questionable' labour. I spoke to a production manager of a major fashion magazine last week who was off to Asia to get his publication printed "by children". I'm not sure he was joking.

Some people don't like what Indian Vogue did because there is the unsavoury truth laid out in front of them. India is big news for the fashion industry at the moment. Internationally recognised names such as Alexander McQueen and Stella McCartney will be opening stores there over the next five years. Jean Paul Gaultier already has one, Burberry two.

The Vogue fashion shoot doesn't solve anything - it wasn't trying to. But let’s not pretend it's the source of the problem, either.