In 1906, muckracking journalist Upton Sinclair became famous for his book The Jungle, which exposed the working conditions of the meatpacking industry. His book led to the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drugs Act: legislation that established the modern federal regulatory system, eventually leading to the US Food and Drug Administration, which survives to this day.

In 1934, Sinclair ran for Governor of California as part of a campaign called End Poverty in California, or EPIC. He lost, and later had this to say:

Truer words have rarely been spoken.

The recent and ongoing scandal of labor exploitation in the Italian luxury industry perfectly illustrates Sinclair’s premise. In essence, in response to allegations of terrible working conditions in what amount to luxury sweatshops in northern Italy—allegations that have in some cases been judged to have been true, have led to judicial administration and, in at least one case, have now progressed to a direct criminal investigation of the luxury company and its executives—a recurring response of the companies involved has been to say, ‘We didn’t know’.

Obviously, ‘We didn’t know’ sounds better than ‘We chose not to look too closely’ or ‘We knew but didn’t care’. The first asks us to accept serious incompetence. The second is willful blindness. The third is morally repugnant. In the case of accused maison de grand luxe Loro Piana, the evidence doesn’t establish the latter two, so their claim to the first stands. The remarkable thing is that the first is damning enough.

When accused of exploiting labor, many luxury houses say ‘We didn’t know’. In doing so, they ask us to believe they’re merely bad at their jobs as opposed to willfully blind or even morally repugnant.

With that in mind, if I were rewriting Sinclair’s quote today, I might say:

It is difficult to get a person to investigate something when their salary depends on them not investigating it.

In May 2025, a Chinese worker in the Milano area complained about exploitation and violence, claiming he had accumulated approximately 10 000 € (approximately $11,600) in unpaid wages and then had been assaulted by his employer with fists and with plastic and aluminum pipes, breaking his hand. The Italian police, the Carabinieri, arrested a Chinese workshop owner and closed his factory in a northwestern suburb of Milano, which had been making cashmere jackets for Loro Piana. The resulting Carabinieri raid corroborated key aspects of his account, and found that the factory had employed ten Chinese laborers, five of them illegal immigrants, while forcing them to work up to 90 hours per week and paying them 4 € ($4.65) per hour.

I want to be clear here: this scandal has nothing to do with ethnicity. The worker and factory owner in this case were Chinese, but workers in similar cases came from a variety of countries, and the owners of at least some of the subcontractors involved were Italian. The problem is exploitation, vulnerability, subcontracting, price pressure, and opacity inside the Italian luxury production system, and the failure of those with a moral responsibility to understand and control that system to investigate it adequately. The problem isn’t the country of origin of those involved, and it’s definitely not ethnicity.

An Italian court placed Loro Piana under judicial administration until the problems could be resolved, following similar moves against the maisons Dior, Armani, and Valentino, among others.

Coincidentally, the same month as the worker stepped forward, an accord was being signed, supposedly to put a stop to this very thing:

If the defense of this were to say that Loro Piana’s actions happened well before the signing of the accord, that would be a weak response. First, the initial draft of the scheme was proposed by a Milano court in June 2024. Second, the offenses weren’t solely in the past: when the Carabineri raided the factories in question, they found the conditions were still in place.

But wait—it gets worse. It was also reported that safety devices had been removed from machinery at the factory in question in order to speed production. I read that and all I could think was that Upton Sinclair meant The Jungle to be an exposé and a cry for action, not to be an instruction manual.

When the announcement of judicial administration was made, Loro Piana issued the following statement:

Keep in mind that other luxury firms—including at least one other major subsidiary of LVMH, Dior—had already been investigated for this sort of thing.

And yet they didn’t know.

And then there’s the issue of geography. The chain went like this: Loro Piana, which has corporate offices in central Milano, subcontracted to a firm called the Evergreen Fashion Group, also in central Milano. Evergreen subcontracted to a firm called Sor-Man, in a northern suburb of Milano called Nova Milanese. Sor-Man then subcontracted to the firms Clover Moda, in the town of Baranzate, and Dai Meiying, in the town of Senago. Every company involved was within 13 km (8 miles) straight-line distance from Loro Piana’s corporate offices in Milano.

And yet they didn’t know.

To be clear, I’m not saying that Loro Piana knew—truly I’m not. I accept their defense. But in employing that defense, they’re choosing to claim incompetence rather than willful blindness or moral repugnance. It’s incompetent to have other luxury firms investigated and monitored by courts for labor exploitation and allow that very thing to continue in your own supply chain. It’s incompetent when at least one of those firms belongs to the same conglomerate as you. It’s incompetent to have that exploitation in your supply chain within the same metropolitan area as your corporate offices. Again:

When accused of exploiting labor, many luxury houses say ‘We didn’t know’. In doing so, they ask us to believe they’re merely bad at their jobs as opposed to willfully blind or even morally repugnant.

The earlier cases—including Loro Piana—were largely about what companies failed to know. Italian courts found serious failures of oversight, but didn’t conclude that the maisons themselves had knowingly intended for workers to be exploited. Tod’s is different.

In November 2025, Milano prosecutors opened a criminal investigation into Tod’s and three of its senior managers. They didn’t just allege that Tod’s should have known what was happening at its subcontractors; they alleged that executives at Tod’s did know.

Prosecutors alleged that Tod’s was “fully aware of and complicit in labour exploitation” and had ignored problems identified by third-party audits over several years. Prosecutors also sought to ban Tod’s from advertising products made through the affected supply chain for six months. Tod’s has denied wrongdoing.

With Loro Piana, I accept the company’s defense that it didn’t know, even though I think that defense is itself damning in ways that Loro Piana perhaps might not intend. In the Tod’s case, prosecutors are effectively saying that executives knew, or that the warnings were sufficiently explicit that they can’t credibly claim ignorance.

Tod’s has since strengthened its supply chain controls, ended relationships with several subcontractors, and asked the court for time to demonstrate those changes. The criminal allegations remain unresolved; they’re allegations, not convictions; and Tod’s denies wrongdoing.

But the Tod’s case changes the fundamental question underlying all of this—a question that faces Italian luxury. That question has changed from “How could they not have known?” to:

“What if some of them did?”

And that’s a question that we should all find considerably uglier.

My point here isn’t to tell you how you should or shouldn’t feel about all of this, or how you should or shouldn’t respond to it. My point is that whatever our response as consumers—individually and collectively—it starts with knowing. Loro Piana says they didn’t know. I take them at their word. We as consumers can do better. What does that mean?

I’m reminded of my rewrite of Sinclair above. I extended his logic to investigating misdeeds: It’s difficult to get a person to investigate something when their salary depends on them not investigating it. But it wouldn’t be fair to apply Sinclair’s formulation to one part of the chain (the managers and leaders of the maisons implicated in this scandal and not another part—in this case, specifically to us as consumers. Perhaps another formulation of Sinclair is also in order:

It is difficult to get a consumer to examine the provenance of the items they buy when their pleasure depends on them not examining it.

Does that mean that the next time we visit your favorite luxury boutique, we should take our consumer muckraker checklist with us and start peppering the staff with questions? No. The average salesperson wouldn’t be able to answer our questions, and I suspect they’re not trained to do so, at least not in a meaningful fashion.

It does mean, though, that we can learn to distinguish transparency from reassurance. Before spending thousands of dollars or euros, spend a few minutes searching the brand’s name and its public record in this domain.

Some companies publish information on the factories that make their goods. Some disclose how many suppliers they audit, how many fail, why they fail, and how many relationships they terminate. Others tell us little more than that they require suppliers to promise to follow a code of conduct. Those aren’t the same thing.

We can also ask whether the maison audits only its direct suppliers or follows the chain into subcontractors; whether it checks that a supplier actually has enough workers and machinery to make what it claims to make; and whether it tells us what changed after a failure. None of this allows us to certify the working conditions behind a particular luxury item. But it allows us to judge something almost as important: whether the maison is being transparent with us about how it makes the items it wants us to buy.

The responsibility for policing factories belongs to the companies placing the orders, not to us. Our responsibility is smaller. We can stop treating vague assurances as evidence. When one maison tells us exactly who its suppliers are, what its audits found, and what it did in response, while another gives us only flowery language about craftsmanship and ethics, that difference should matter.

We don’t have to become investigators. But we can stop rewarding opacity.

As you might have guessed, there’s more to this story. It’s not just that the maisons in question are accused of breaking their moral obligation to ensure the workers who make their goods are treated like—well, like human beings. They’re accused of breaking their obligation to us as consumers.

In the manifesto for this newsletter—the first article I published on the site—I wrote:

What the companies involved in these scandals are accused of doing is a betrayal of the luxury promise, specifically the imperatives to adopt sustainable craftsmanship and to uplift people and communities. I started this newsletter in part to be a voice advocating for luxury brands to do far better than what I had seen. What I didn’t realize was that some of them, at least, were already alleged to have been doing far worse than I could have imagined.

And we haven’t yet asked what may be the ugliest question of all: what did this actually save? When a 3 000 € luxury product was made in a workshop that was paid tens of euros to make it, how much more would lawful, ethical labor really have cost—and who would have had to pay the difference?

More to come.