Real Life

Norwegian reality show turns wealthy fashion bloggers into sweatshop workers

A Norwegian program has plucked three fashion bloggers from their lives of privilege and put them to work in a Cambodian sweatshop to film their experiences.
One of the bloggers breaks down in the trailer.

The web series Sweatshop: Dead Cheap Fashion documents the journey of bloggers Frida, Ludvig, and Anniken during their month long visit to Phnom Penh where they lived and worked among local sweatshop workers.

At the opening of the show’s trailer the question flashes: “What happens when you send three Norwegian youths abroad to meet the workers that sew our clothes?”

Gauging from the powerful one minute clip, the experience proves to be an emotional wakeup call for each of the fashionistas, who discover that their appetite for cheap high street clothing comes at a costly moral price for the people in third world factories making them.

The series comes two years after the Rana Plaza, a garment factory building in Bangladesh, collapsed killing 1,138 and injuring more than 2,500 – by far the worst sweatshop accident of its kind in the world’s history.

The youngster’s harsh firsthand account of a sweatshop reality has already gained popularity with more than one million views on Youtube.

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