The advertised transmission of The Devil Wears Primark on Sunday 1 June 2008 was postponed. We plan to show the programme at a later date.

Showing it now might be a quite timely. I was thinking about it after the story broke this weekend that Primark is using a factory in Manchester that pays illegal immigrants £3 an hour to make clothes.

In case you haven’t figured it out, I detest Primark, and the wider issue of sweatshops also gets me agitated. It doesn’t take a lot of brain power to figure out that a ten quid jumper with several hundred sequins sewn on to it is going to be made by someone who is being paid virtually nothing. Yet otherwise intelligent people actively boast about shopping there as though it’s something to be admired. Really, you might as well boast about voting Conservative as far as I’m concerned. (Like Lucy Pinder, in fact. Yuck. Gone off her.)

And it’s unsurprising that Primark’s horrible brown paper carrier bags are the size of bin liners. The clothes are so cheap that the dismal concept of buying a great big pile of stuff, wearing it once and throwing it away is virtually a part of the brand identity.

Rather than face up to the longstanding problem of slave labour in its supply chain, Primark actually has signs in its stores bigging up its ethical credentials. It has now been forced to withdraw these references to the Ethical Trading Initiative, pending an investigation.

All of which is good. The problem is that although the News of the World broke this story, how many of its three million readers actually care? Until the wearing of sweatshop-produced clothing becomes socially unacceptable (like drink driving, or voting Conservative), not a lot is going to change.

I didn’t hear the continuity announcement but it seems fairly obvious it’s been pulled for “legal reasons”. Possibly it’s an injunction although it isn’t too clear. According to someone who claims to work for Primark, posting on Digital Spy, it’s an issue to do with the secret filming of Primark staff without obscuring their identity. Hmm.

I’m talking about the often crappy conditions in which clothes are made in Asia for sale on the British high street. Sweatshops, in other words. For some time now I have held the silent conviction that anyone who shops in Gap or Primark should be garrotted. OK, well maybe not garrotted, but perhaps forced to work a 48-hour week sewing clothes for 13p an hour.

According to the Guardian last year,

A nine-month pregnant woman from Shalina Creations, a factory supplying Gap, went into labour at work and subsequently lost her baby.

Rathnamma, 27, a mother of two, claimed that she was refused immediate leave on March 29 this year, after going into labour. When she asked to go home, the production manager made her fill in forms that took an hour and a half, she said. “I was in such pain, I could hardly stand up.”

When she finally made it outside the factory gates, she collapsed, she said, and gave birth to the baby in the street. A passerby helped her into an auto rickshaw, but when she got home, she discovered the baby was dead. Rathnamma, who has returned to work after being given paid leave for three months, said: “I feel angry. They gave me money, but nothing will bring the baby back. But I need the job. If I have no job, I have no food.”

Gap representatives in the US did not dispute her allegations. However, a Gap representative in India denied that she was refused immediate leave, said that she gave birth in a rickshaw, and not on the street, and claimed the baby died when it slipped from her grasp.

There’s one to frighten the children, not to mention the PR people.

Someone In Television apparently shared my concerns, hence the recent Blood, Sweat and T-Shirts on BBC Three, and the forthcoming The Devil Wears Primark on Channel 4, which struck me as an uncharacteristically fine title for a Channel 4 programme until I Googled it and saw the 5,000 websites that have already used it.

There’s a tendency to turn the topic into a shallow piece of “factual entertainment” and, being an often dull and rather overtly serious person at times, I would naturally prefer a proper documentary (and not one of the amusing Jon Ronson/Louis Theroux-type, either). Still, better to engage with morons than have them turn over to Big Brother, I suppose. So let’s see what happens.

I’ve just seen him refer to some women as his “Gokettes”. Way to foster self-esteem, Gok! Ladies, if you attend the nail salon regularly and concentrate deeply on being “on trend”, you too can be elevated to the status of one of Gok’s push-up bra-wearing harem. Boobalicious!

It gets worse. He’s also changed his own first name into a verb, like Google. What is “Gok-ing”? I don’t know. No-one knows.

Here are some other varients of the G-word, which Gok will be using next week:

• Gok-ing hell – exclamation
• Gok off – polite way of saying “fuck off”
• Gok forth and multiply – polite way of saying “Gok off”
• Gok-a-doodle-doo! – exclamation (chicken)

Feel free to add your own.

Value-added information: Gok has a range of glasses at Specsavers. He also holds the record for least interesting guest ever to appear on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross.

He appeared on BBC Four’s documentary series Savile Row tonight, which featured a lot of grumbling, sharp-suited tailors bemoaning the presence on “the Row” of A&F, which opened its first store outside North America there last year. Actually, all but one of them was grumbling. One of the tailors at Norton & Sons (Est. 1821) said he wished A&F well and dropped the bombshell that Jeffries likes to come in for bespoke suits.

Cue the blond-haired, square-headed dude in flip-flops, who claimed to have never had a Savile Row suit before because he could never afford it. He espoused a deep, glassy-eyed wonder for the craftsmanship and retailing prowess of Savile Row’s tailors and suggested that Abercrombie & Fitch could evolve in similar terms.

I seem to remember blogging about Jeffries before at Vox, but it bears repeating that he is a very strange bloke. His face looks like it’s made of Play Doh, he’s about seven foot tall, orange and, as mentioned, always wears what the Americans call “thongs”.

He’s incredibly intense and “lives the brand” like no other CEO in the world. None of which would stick in the mind that much were it not for the fact that A&F’s flagship stores, with their high camp intensity, penchant for darkness, booming disco and barely dressed models pretending to be shop assistants are, themselves, pretty weird places to be.

I find him fascinating. Not necessarily in a good way. But fascinating. Kind of like Tom Cruise. Or Satan.

And despite being in his sixties, Jeffries wears nothing but Abercrombie gear, which is a little creepy considering it’s really aimed at teenagers. I guess we should be thankful he isn’t the boss of Agent Provocateur.

Image: Salon.com

I haven’t read all 270+ comments but glancing through, I notice no-one makes the obvious point that ties are essentially a phallic symbol, something exploited for comic effect by the likes of Ricky Gervais (David Brent in The Office is constantly fiddling with his, making explicit the tie’s position as the last sartorial refuge of the woefully useless middle manager).

Now the floods have died down, Wimbledon’s finished, the PM’s bedded in and no-one appears to be plotting a “terrorist outrage”, the papers have wrung the story for all it’s worth. My favourite observation is from Dylan Jones, GQ editor and tedious iPod fetishist, who claims in the Telegraph that “when men do wear ties, it makes them more powerful”. Yes, especially when you wrap them round your head and bellow like a monkey. Feel the power, Dylan. Feel the power.

Is bringing the iPod out of your pocket in order to turn the volume up and down really a major problem for car salesmen, insurance clerks and others who wear M&S suits on a daily basis? Why would you want wires inside your suit? The suit also contains lycra. Lycra, I ask you.

The picture in the Mail is priceless and goes to show that male models in suits should probably be outlawed, especially when being forced to pose in a way that “demonstrates” the workings of the world’s most hi-tech but least fashionable garment. If you look closely, you can see it’s basically a suit with some rather shoddy slashes on the inner lining in which wires and iPod are shoved. Genius.

I also love the way the Mail goes on to report in some wonderment that, come the year 2020, we will all be wearing Buck Rogers-inspired tin-foil (I paraphrase), containing “TV screen technology using materials so thin and flexible that they can be worn like clothes”, which “could display moving images, changing colours or designs to match the mood of the wearer”.

Yes! And all our household chores will be done by robots wearing aprons.

Via Gizmodo.