Fashion historian Audrey Millet publishes “Abdoul’s odyssey – investigation into organized crime”. An investigative essay close to the novel which follows the journey of Abdoul, an Ivorian tailor prey to Italian, Nigerian and Chinese mafias. A story of human trafficking as much as fashion and couture.
Audrey Millet is a fashion historian who studies the links between “made in Italy” and organized crime. She is notably the author of the “Black Book of Fashion” (2021) and “Woke Washing. Capitalism, consumerism, opportunism” (2023). His latest book, “Abdoul’s odyssey – investigation into organized crime” traces the journey of Abdoul, met in 2022 in front of a “made in China” fashion store in Prato, Italy.
“When I met Abdoul, he told me: ‘I am a tailor for such and such a brand’. He was in a legal situation, and I am a clothing historian. I asked him if he wanted to tell me a little bit about the fashion industry and its bad sides – the good ones don’t really interest me”, says Audrey Millet in the Vertigo show on November 7.
A human trafficking network
Before telling her the behind-the-scenes of the fashion industry, Abdoul wants to clarify to Audrey Millet that he never wanted to come to Italy. Abdoul is Ivorian. He is a tailor and unknowingly took the road to slavery in 2015. Exploited in Burkina Faso then in Niger, he found himself in a Libyan work camp where there was starvation, torture and prostitution. Thrown half-dead into a boat en route to Italy, he eventually arrived in Prato, a textile city prey to Italian, Nigerian and Chinese mafias.
“Little by little, while he told me about all the stages of his journey, I tried to put myself in his backpack, in all the countries he crossed, on the boat in the Mediterranean, and to analyze, to overlook with a sociological and historical method, which he did not understand at the time, that is to say that he was caught up in human trafficking networks”, indicates the historian.
A story of fashion and couture
It took Abdoul a year to agree to go into the details of his story to deliver them to Audrey Millet. A year also to regain memory, erased by trauma. Despite the intensity of the story delivered by Abdoul, it is indeed an investigation that Audrey Millet signs: “I tried to write it like a novel, I didn’t really have a choice, Abdoul’s life is so romantic.”
Through Abdoul’s story, Audrey Millet dissects the global trafficking networks – of weapons, drugs, organs, human beings – in which so many migrants find themselves trapped. She delivers a salutary investigative essay. “I have the hope that humanity will return to its place and that we will stop being obsessed with our little comforts, our scarf, our new clothes. Because it is also a story of fashion and sewing” , she concludes.
Comments collected by Michel Ndeze
Adaptation web: ld
Audrey Millet, “Abdoul’s odyssey – investigation into organized crime”, Les Pérégrines, August 2024.
