Francie Huisinga’s Response to the Fashion Industry’s Dishonorable Acts

In Francie Huisinga’s 2019 article, they argue that the fashion industry has a long history of intellectual property theft, as well as racial, social, and cultural appropriation. The author represents their point very well in their article with help from rhetorical strategies such as pathos and logos. Despite these strategies, the article contains some logical fallacies.

In the article, The author writes that the fashion industry “pretends” (5) to pride itself on innovation and change when it comes to diversity and that the fashion industry “dehumanizes and exploits its mostly non-white workers” (5) in areas like India or Bangladesh. There have been countless meetings and conferences held in efforts to fix this issue but there has been very little progress made thus far.

Pathos is one of the main rhetorical strategies that the author uses. For example, the author writes as follows, “...a person to work their way to the top on their own, often, even if unintentionally, at someone else’s expense” (2). This works well because of the author’s choice of wording, specifically the phrase “at someone else’s expense.” This phrase is powerful and can make the reader feel emotional about the topic at hand and can present the argument in a new light with the analogy.

One of the fallacies in this article is a false binary. The author writes “those of the fashion industry believe themselves above reproach and consider everything, including cultural representations they did not even try to appreciate, theirs for the taking” (3). The way that the specific sentence is worded and written comes off wrong. This is because this statement generalizes the argument at hand. This statement that the author writes comes off as very aggressive, and it oversimplifies the argument.

All in all, Huisinga does a relatively good job using appropriate appeals and other rhetoric to make their argument powerful and convincing; there are just a few fallacies throughout.