Gap or Chasm So this has really been bugging me→[More:]

Lo about the 90s I guess there, was the revelation that the Gap was using child/slave labor at the time when lots of mass produced clothes were guilty of this, and avoiding them was no big deal.

Around over 5 years ago (?), I was asking an old college friend where she got some kind of exercise clothes or something and she mentioned Athleta, which she said was associate with the Gap. I mentioned the whole child/slave labor thing and she got huffy about it-- this gets hard to explain, she mentioned shopping at Old Navy which had not that long go had a big public labor issue, which she defended as being poor. (She lives in NY, she's a vegetarian, she's a very hit or miss hodge podge of issues that do or don't matter that has no through line or logic I know of. This is not the vegetarian who worked in a leather store, but it's a mess.)

Anyway, I was looking at their stuff and didn't know they were all the same conglomerate but they seemed like separate entities and they'd had a long time to deal with their issues, so I thought. I ended up trying and liking a few things from Athleta, which softened me to the idea of getting some cheap convenient things from the Gap.

Then John Oliver did his piece on the Gap which killed any hope I had that they had reformed at all. In looking into some very messed up stuff about Dress Barn, it generally seemed that the clothes industry was pretty much fucked on most all levels of labor until you hit connections with management.

So a couple weeks ago the Gap sends out some pr fluff about what they do to help their workers, but really, they can't be trusted, can they? Can any mass produced clothes you don't research out the wazoo? Because I'm not in touch with the people who use to keep me up on such things, I don't have the time and money to do the research or avoid such things-- at this point I'd just like some input on if I should totally avoid the Gap forever or if they or anyone can make a turn around.