Timothy Pate

It turns out Beyoncé’s sportswear line, “Ivy Park,” is made in a Sri Lankan sweatshop where workers experience “abominable working conditions and very low pay.” The Frisky:

In a breathless lede, Page Six reports on a facet of the fast fashion business that anyone with common sense would understand, writing that “Multi-millionaire singer Beyoncé reportedly contracts with overseas clothing companies that use sweatshop labor to manufacture her sportswear line.

The Frisky observes, however, the lazy war against capitalism being waged on Twitter:

Sweatshop labor is a terrible reality of our current economy where consumers clamor for more options for less money. Fast fashion is a scourge, it’s true. But, so is capitalism. And we live in a capitalistic society; this is less a pet theory and more insurmountable fact. Unless everything you’re wearing is couture, plucked from the runway and made to your exact measurements by seamstresses in the bowels of Karl Lagerfeld’s atelier, then you are complicit in the cycle.

So yes: it’s a shame that Beyoncé’s “’empowerment’…is clearly only for the consumers not the producers,” as The Frisky puts it. But the tragedy is the system that encourages Beyoncé to seek the cheapest means of production, at whatever cost.