Local Designer Fights Sweatshops with Fashion

On display in one corner of Elizabeth Sy's Oakland apartment and work studio is a suitcase that symbolizes her life's journey. A few years ago, Sy, a stylish Cambodian American with splashes of electric color at the tips of her dark hair, made a bold career transition from sex worker to fashion designer.

Sy is the youngest of 10 children from a Cambodian family that immigrated, in 1981, to the United States shortly before she was born.

The hidden strength of Sy's burgeoning fashion label, Lush Orchid, could lie in her strong family bond and cultural history. The Oakland-based designer shares her line of handbags and T-shirts with her mother, Eang, and her sister Teang, cofounders of the ETE design label (the letters are the first initials of each of their names). The label also includes Lotus Seed, Teang's maternity line.

Lush Orchid's mission is to be a socially conscious company that sells affordably priced merchandise without supporting sweatshop labor. The label's silk-screened T-shirts include empowering phrases such as "Our voices come together and shatter the once deafening roar." Bright and elegant clutches showcase a pride in Cambodia's shimmering silks.

Until recently, Sy was working as an exotic dancer and apprenticing as a dominatrix. She also taught a female sexuality class at UC Berkeley and continues to work at a nonprofit providing outreach to sex workers. When Sy's mother discovered her daughter was working in the sex industry, she offered to help start Sy's fashion label, allowing Sy to stop dancing and keep afloat financially.

The clothing and accessories line began to materialize when Sy, accompanied by her sister and mother, took a trip to Cambodia to acquaint themselves with their cultural roots and to purchase their inventory. While there, Sy hunted down cotton fabrics for the T-shirts and traditional Khmer silks for the handbags. Determined to pay international fair-trade prices, they had thousands of shirts and bags made by Cambodian seamstresses working out of their own shops.

Realizing that many find socially responsible shopping prohibitively expensive, Sy has made it a goal to keep her prices low. "I just think it would be a shame to buy this stuff for $40," she says, explaining her reluctance to sell the clothes and bags to high-end boutiques. Instead, she avoids huge retail markups by selling her clothes at a discount to the artists' collective Rock Paper Scissors and directly to customers. Shirts run from $15 to $25, while bags go for $20 to $30.

Sy also sells her wares at craft fairs, such as the Belle Bizarre, put on by the Center for Sex and Culture in early December. As profiled in the New York Times, the event sold goods like pasties and garter belts to holiday shoppers in order to raise money for the nonprofit, which runs sex education programs for adults.

Sy's former career remained on the legal end of sex work and hasn't interfered with starting a business. However, according to Robyn Few, executive director of the Sex Workers Outreach Program (SWOP), many former sex workers face obstacles when looking for new jobs. Often sex workers have five or ten unaccountable years on their résumé they cannot explain to potential employers. And if they've been arrested, they must often disclose their criminal history on state applications for professional licenses; the city does not ask for criminal history on the business tax certificate application.

Happy with her new career, which she documents in a blog on Lush Orchid's Web site, Sy is trying to employ former Cambodian sex workers as her seamstresses, though organizing this has been difficult in the current Cambodian political climate.

Of her mission to help other sex workers transition to new careers, she says, "I've had to go back to the thing I was trying to get away from." Given the young designer's habit of maintaining close ties to her past, it makes sense that she keeps that suitcase from her first trip to Cambodia around. The slogan printed on its side could easily be transferred onto one of her T-shirts: "Today I woke up and realized that I had been sleeping for twenty years."

LUSH ORCHID

http://www.lushorchid.com

lushorchid [at] gmail.com

LOTUS SEED

http://www.lotus-seed.com

ROCK PAPER SCISSORS

2278 Telegraph, Oakl.

(510) 238-9171

http://www.rpscollective.com

REPRINTED FROM BAY GUARDIAN