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Sex Fashion: New clothing line |
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Written by McClatchy — Tribune
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Wednesday, 26 July 2006 |
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Clothing line designed by prostitutes becomes cultural phenomenon
 Brazil — With her braided hair coming out from the side of her head and her long legs revealing years of bruises and scars, Jane Eloy made her way down the runway at a Copacabana Beach hotel last week with an enormous grin.
After years of working as a prostitute on this city’s meanest streets, Eloy, 31, was showing off brightly colored skirts, G-strings and other clothes that she and about a dozen of her colleagues had designed for the fashion line Daspu.
But she was doing more than that.
“We’re changing people’s minds about us,” she said. “We’re winning respect for what we do.”
Daspu is a fashion house founded and run by prostitutes whose designs have become the talk of Brazil’s fashion industry nine months after its start. Its success has surprised its founders, who see its sudden prominence as a revolutionary moment for a country long ambivalent about its world-famous sex industry.
Prostitutes like Eloy have been modeling their fashions practically everywhere, from seedy downtown plazas where many still work at night to trendy fashion shows attended by the well-heeled.
 Its models have been featured in the Brazilian edition of Vogue magazine and will be seen soon in Marie Claire. Last month, they shared the spotlight with supermodel Gisele Bundchen at Fashion Rio, one of the city’s biggest fashion showcases.
Gabriela Leite, a trained sociologist and former prostitute who directs the Davida prostitute advocacy group that runs Daspu, said she and others thought up Daspu last year after Brazil’s government turned down $40 million in U.S. anti-AIDS funding that was conditioned on the country condemning commercial sex work.
“We talked a lot about this and laughed a lot about the stupidity of it, and then we started asking what we could do to raise our own money in our way,” Leite said.
The idea stayed on paper until November, when Leite and her colleagues released Daspu’s first line of T-shirts. Public consciousness about the fashion line soon grew, thanks to a much-publicized spat over its name, which is short for “das putas,” or “of the whores” in Portuguese.
Daspu’s goal isn’t only selling clothes. It’s also making people face up to the thorny issues surrounding Brazil’s sex industry, Leite said.
The goal, Leite said, is to make prostitution like any other legal profession, with the same labor protections that other workers enjoy. “Anyone who says ... prostitution is outside the mainstream is fooling themselves,” she said. “We’ve always been here and we’re here to stay.” | Only registered users can write comments.
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