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A recent investigation into factories in Italy found the luxury brand guilty of exploiting contractors.
Like most luxury fashion brands, Dior is renowned for their elegance and meticulous craftsmanship.
The company has long prided themselves on the savoir faire required to make their products – particularly their handbags, widely considered Dior’s most coveted pieces.
A recent investigation by the Comando Carabinieri per la Tutela del Lavoro, however, has threatened to dismantle the polished facade Dior takes painstaking efforts to sustain.
The Italian government agency for workers protections has revealed, after observing working practices in Italian factories, that the subcontractors who manufacture Dior bags are subject to sub-par conditions.
The allegations have triggered an Italian court to place the workers unit, called Manufactures Dior SRL and fully owned by Christian Dior Italia SRL, under court administration on Monday. According to reports, the pattern of big fashion companies in Italy violating workers’ rights isn’t a one-off, and is often done to increase profits.
Dior has long been synonymous with luxury and exclusivity, its reputation staunchly built on quality craftsmanship. Suggestions of lacklustre working conditions, however, reveals a troubling dissonance between high-end fashion’s public image and its internal operations.
The investigation found that subcontractors hired to make Dior’s bags often slept at the workers’ facility to ensure they were available for service ‘24 hours a day’.
Safety devices on machines were also removed so operations could go faster, thus curbing production costs down to as little as €53 ($57) for a handbag that’s otherwise sold at €2,600 ($2,794).
This is the third legal pursuit by the Milan court in charge of pre-emptive measures, which in April named a commissioner to run a company owned by Giorgio Armani – following accusations the fashion group was ‘culpably failing’ to adequately oversee its suppliers.
Despite legal action delving into suppliers rather than Dior directly, the probe isn’t a good look for such a high-profile brand, which is currently headed by Delphine Arnoult, the daughter of LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault.
It was also reported that Dior did not take appropriate measures to check the working conditions of the contracting companies by ‘not carrying out periodic supplier audits’.
The findings cast a spotlight on the luxury industry and Italian supply chains – the same production process that high-end brands have long used to burnish their image. For companies like Dior and Armani, ‘Made in Italy’ has become a shorthand for quality, craftsmanship, and ethical manufacturing.
But the reports that workers are subject to minimum pay, gruelling hours, and unsafe working conditions suggests factories in Italy are operating as little more than sweatshops.
