Clothing Line Made by Prostitutes Gains Popularity

With her braided hair coming out from the side of her head and her long legs revealing years of wear and tear, Jane Eloy made her way down the runway at a Copacabana Beach hotel last week with an enormous grin. The Mercury News recently reported that after years of working as a prostitute on this city's meanest streets, Eloy, 31, was showing off brightly colored skirts, G-strings and other clothes that she and about a dozen of her colleagues had designed for the fashion line Daspu. But she was doing more than that. "We're changing people's minds about us," she told the Mercury News. "We're winning respect for what we do." Daspu is a fashion house founded and run by prostitutes whose designs have become the talk of Brazil's fashion industry nine months after its start. Its success has surprised its founders, who see its sudden prominence as a revolutionary moment for a country long ambivalent about its world-famous sex industry. Prostitutes like Eloy have been modeling their fashions practically everywhere, from seedy downtown plazas where many still work at night to trendy fashion shows attended by the well-heeled.

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