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Darkside of Fashion

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01 / More than meets the eye

Holy War at Harrods: The Vanity Fair Allegations That Triggered Mohamed Al-Fayed's Two-Year Legal Battle

Vanity Fair, Maureen Orth, and Mohamed Al-Fayed 1990s Drugs, Sex & Model Abuse Archive: verified 4/5 wildness

Maureen Orth's 1995 Vanity Fair article "Holy War at Harrods" published allegations of sexual assault involving Mohamed Al-Fayed, then the flamboyant owner of Harrods. Al-Fayed responded with a two-year legal battle against Condé Nast, creating an extraordinary collision between investigative fashion-and-society journalism, one of London's most powerful retail figures, and the magazine's willingness to stand behind a highly damaging account. In December 1997, Al-Fayed dropped the case and accepted a settlement; Vanity Fair issued no apology and retracted none of the article's text. The dispute acquired an almost surreal cloak-and-dagger quality when Condé Nast UK's chief executive Nicholas Coleridge met Al-Fayed's director of public affairs, Michael Cole, in the steam baths of London's Bath & Racquets Club. The men reportedly met to discuss ending the libel conflict and took precautions over the possibility of covert listening devices, though no agreement was reached at that meeting. Both sides ultimately paid their own legal costs, leaving the article intact and the allegations publicly unresolved while demonstrating the legal and personal risks of publishing sexual-misconduct claims against elite commercial power brokers.

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02 / The daily darkside

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Holy War at Harrods: The Vanity Fair Allegations That Triggered Mohamed Al-Fayed's Two-Year Legal BattleAI concept artwork

Archive Record · 1990s

Drugs, Sex & Model Abuse4/5 wildness

Holy War at Harrods: The Vanity Fair Allegations That Triggered Mohamed Al-Fayed's Two-Year Legal Battle

Vanity Fair, Maureen Orth, and Mohamed Al-Fayed / 1990s

Maureen Orth's 1995 Vanity Fair article "Holy War at Harrods" published allegations of sexual assault involving Mohamed Al-Fayed, then the flamboyant owner of Harrods. Al-Fayed responded with a two-year legal battle against Condé Nast, creating an extraordinary collision between investigative fashion-and-society journalism, one of London's most powerful retail figures, and the magazine's willingness to stand behind a highly damaging account. In December 1997, Al-Fayed dropped the case and accepted a settlement; Vanity Fair issued no apology and retracted none of the article's text. The dispute acquired an almost surreal cloak-and-dagger quality when Condé Nast UK's chief executive Nicholas Coleridge met Al-Fayed's director of public affairs, Michael Cole, in the steam baths of London's Bath & Racquets Club. The men reportedly met to discuss ending the libel conflict and took precautions over the possibility of covert listening devices, though no agreement was reached at that meeting. Both sides ultimately paid their own legal costs, leaving the article intact and the allegations publicly unresolved while demonstrating the legal and personal risks of publishing sexual-misconduct claims against elite commercial power brokers.

Archive: verified

03 / The fashion archive

More Stories from the Fashion Archive

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Look a little closer.

1506 stories

1506 stories in this selection.

01

Drugs, Sex & Model Abuse1970s

From Heroin Addiction and Tompkins Square Park to New York Punk Style Icon

Jimmy Webb

After leaving community college, Jimmy Webb hitchhiked to Florida and New York and began living in Manhattan in 1975. He developed a heroin addiction during the city's troubled 1970s, initially settling around Fourth Street and Avenue D and sometimes sleeping in Tompkins Square Park or at the St. Marks Baths. The biography offers no indication that Webb exploited models or was involved in a fashion-industry abuse scandal; the documented episode is instead a stark account of addiction, precarious housing, and immersion in the downtown milieu that later shaped his punk-fashion identity. Webb ultimately became the long-time manager of Trash and Vaudeville, where from 1999 he helped dress performers including the Ramones, Joan Jett, Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, and Sebastian Bach. His trajectory—from street-level survival and heroin dependence to a celebrated authority on New York rock style—made him an emblematic figure of the city's punk retail underground. He later opened the rock boutique I Need More in 2017, before dying of cancer in Manhattan in 2020.

Archive: verified ↗
02

Drugs, Sex & Model Abuse2000s–2010s

The Casting Barrier: How Locs Were Treated as a Liability in Fashion and Pageantry

Fashion modeling agencies and international beauty-pageant industry

The text describes a quieter but pervasive form of fashion-industry exclusion: Black models were pressured to abandon natural hairstyles in order to satisfy conservative casting standards. Model Adesuwa Aighewi reportedly locked her hair and was warned that she might receive fewer, or no, casting calls because of her dreadlocks, while other Black women associated with modeling agencies were forced to straighten their hair. The prejudice was not presented as a single scandal involving one executive, but as an entrenched aesthetic system that treated Eurocentric hair as more commercially acceptable and locs as unprofessional, politically coded, or difficult for stylists to manage. The page also notes that no Black Miss America winner had worn locs at the time discussed, suggesting how pageant ideals of respectability reinforced the same hierarchy. Resistance became visible on international stages: Zahra Redwood, a Rastafarian and Miss Universe Jamaica in 2007, wore her locs in competition; Sanneta Myrie became the first Miss Jamaica World contestant to wear locs at Miss World in 2015; and Dee-Ann Kentish-Rogers won Miss Universe Great Britain in 2018 with natural locs. Their appearances challenged the idea that Black women had to chemically alter or conceal their hair to be considered elegant, employable, or crown-worthy, although the source does not identify specific agencies, contracts, lawsuits, or disciplinary proceedings.

Unverified ↗
03

Drugs, Sex & Model Abuse2010s

The Hungry Catwalks of Sydney Fashion Week 2014

Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Sydney; Alex Perry; Vivien’s model Laura Mitchell

Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Sydney, held from 6 to 10 April 2014 at Carriageworks, became the setting for a public confrontation over the fashion industry's treatment of extremely thin models. Marie Claire editor Jackie Frank reportedly contacted a model's agent to question the model's health after seeing her on the runway. Designer Alex Perry, whose show featured exceptionally thin models, subsequently apologised publicly. Frank argued that the apology could help shift entrenched attitudes about body image in Australian fashion, where the visual ideal promoted on the catwalk had increasingly attracted scrutiny from editors, health advocates, and the public. The episode revived an earlier industry pledge from 2008, when Sydney Fashion Week said it would promote a healthier-looking runway standard. The controversy was compounded by testimony from Vivien’s model Laura Mitchell, who told the media that most shows during the 2014 festival had not provided catering, leaving models hungry while they worked through demanding schedules. The account exposed a stark contradiction in the event’s polished commercial image: designers and brands were spending as much as $80,000 on individual presentations, while the young people whose bodies were central to those spectacles could reportedly lack even basic food provision. The source does not establish that any model was diagnosed with an eating disorder or deliberately starved, but the combination of extreme thinness, health concerns, and inadequate backstage catering made the incident a notable warning about runway labor conditions and body-image culture.

Archive: verified ↗
04

Drugs, Sex & Model Abuse2010s

The 2019 Nude-Photo Hack, Extortion Plot, and Petrol-Station Robbery That Forced Ms Puiyi to Reclaim Her Image

Ms Puiyi (Siew Pui Yi)

In late 2019, Malaysian model and influencer Siew Pui Yi became the target of a calculated digital extortion scheme after her laptop was compromised while undergoing repairs. Hackers gained access to her Google Drive accounts and stole private and unreleased nude photographs. Fans subsequently warned her about suspicious emails advertising the images for sale. According to her account, she paid MYR 18,000 in an attempt to stop the material from being distributed, but the incident escalated into a physical robbery: when she went to a Shell petrol station to meet the perpetrators, three helmeted individuals damaged her car mirror, seized the cash, and fled. The hackers later demanded another MYR 50,000, turning the theft of intimate images into an organized intimidation campaign involving both online extortion and an alleged street-level ambush. Rather than continue paying, Puiyi publicly described the ordeal and chose to monetize images on her own terms through OnlyFans. The episode illustrates how a hacked model's private photographs could be transformed into a coercive revenue stream, while also showing the blurred boundary between cybercrime, sexual exploitation, and influencer branding in the platform economy.

Archive: verified ↗
05

Drugs, Sex & Model Abuse2000s

Abercrombie's 2009 'Humor Tees' and the Retailing of Sexual Provocation

Abercrombie & Fitch

Abercrombie's Back-to-School 2009 collection showed how aggressively the company blurred youth retail, sexual spectacle, and brand promotion. Its so-called 'humor tees' included 'Show the twins' above an image of a woman opening her blouse toward two men, along with shirts stating 'Female streaking encouraged' and 'Female Students Wanted for Sexual Research.' The American Family Association objected that the designs promoted a lifestyle treating sex as recreation and asked the company to remove them. Abercrombie refused to comply, preserving the shirts as part of the provocative persona that had defined its advertising and store environments. Although the episode does not establish a criminal abuse case, it is authentic evidence of the brand's deliberate sexualization of youth-oriented merchandising, a practice that later became increasingly difficult to defend as parents, activists, and consumers challenged the company's exclusionary and eroticized image.

Archive: verified ↗
06

Drugs, Sex & Model Abuse2010s

The 2018 Explicit-Photo Allegations That Ended Gosha Rubchinskiy's Label

Gosha Rubchinskiy

In December 2018, Gosha Rubchinskiy, one of the most influential designers of post-Soviet streetwear, became the subject of serious sexual-misconduct allegations. A 16-year-old boy alleged that Rubchinskiy had requested explicit photographs from him through text messages and published screenshots that he said documented the exchange. Shortly afterward, another man made a similar allegation. Rubchinskiy denied both claims, and the available account does not establish a criminal conviction or judicial finding against him. The scandal nevertheless struck at the designer's image and at the informal, digitally mediated casting culture surrounding youth-oriented fashion, where direct messages and personal access could blur professional boundaries. Rubchinskiy shut down his eponymous brand later in 2018. When he relaunched the label in 2025, its stated casting policy prohibited casting opportunities from being arranged through text messages and required the presence of a formal casting team, an apparent institutional response to the controversy and a broader fashion-industry reckoning over unsupervised contact with young models.

Unverified ↗
Showing 1–6 of 1506

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From the Fashion archive

Vanity Fair, Maureen Orth, and Mohamed Al-Fayed / 1990s

Holy War at Harrods: The Vanity Fair Allegations That Triggered Mohamed Al-Fayed's Two-Year Legal Battle

Drugs, Sex & Model AbuseArchive: verified4/5 wildness

Maureen Orth's 1995 Vanity Fair article "Holy War at Harrods" published allegations of sexual assault involving Mohamed Al-Fayed, then the flamboyant owner of Harrods. Al-Fayed responded with a two-year legal battle against Condé Nast, creating an extraordinary collision between investigative fashion-and-society journalism, one of London's most powerful retail figures, and the magazine's willingness to stand behind a highly damaging account. In December 1997, Al-Fayed dropped the case and accepted a settlement; Vanity Fair issued no apology and retracted none of the article's text. The dispute acquired an almost surreal cloak-and-dagger quality when Condé Nast UK's chief executive Nicholas Coleridge met Al-Fayed's director of public affairs, Michael Cole, in the steam baths of London's Bath & Racquets Club. The men reportedly met to discuss ending the libel conflict and took precautions over the possibility of covert listening devices, though no agreement was reached at that meeting. Both sides ultimately paid their own legal costs, leaving the article intact and the allegations publicly unresolved while demonstrating the legal and personal risks of publishing sexual-misconduct claims against elite commercial power brokers.

Follow the sources

Status and citations are supplied by the archive. AI concept art is an interpretation, not historical evidence.