Fashion’s Circuit: Personal Stories From a Global Industry

Join us for a special screening of the documentaries My Fancy High Heels and El Salvador Journal and post-screening conversation with Taiwanese director Chao-ti Ho on the profound impact of rapid globalization and the growth of multinational corporations on international labor conditions and the environment. My Fancy High Heels follows a pair of designer high-heeled shoes from their production in a factory on the Chinese-Russian border to the streets of New York City to illuminate the enormous disparities between the producers and consumers of luxury fashion goods. In El Salvador Journal, workers protest and organize to successfully establish a worker-managed factory after a multinational corporation based in Taiwan closes its El Salvador plant without warning. The documentary features correspondence between Gilberto Garcia, one of the factory workers, and Chen Hsin-Hsing, a Taiwanese professor who offers his support to the workers in a display of transnational solidarity.

Chao-ti Ho is a documentary film producer and director. For many years, her films have centered on marginal, non-mainstream subjects, including traditional ethnic music and hybrid contemporary culture. She has worked as a magazine editor-in-chief and as a newspaper and television journalist.