favela chic

From allafrica.com, read how designers are hitting pay dirt in the slums. When I was living in Rocinha, some savvy neighbors used to joke that the things that favela dwellers are wearing this year are always purloined and presented on the runways in Milan and New York the following year -- at amazingly high prices. Ah globalization...or perhaps it's better to echo the unemployed Cape Town resident quoted in the article and call it by a more straightforward name: "daylight robbery of the have-nots"?