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McClatchy Newspapers
(MCT)
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil - With her braided hair coming out from the side of her head and her long legs revealing years of bruises and scars, Jane Eloy made her way down the runway at a Copacabana Beach hotel last week with an enormous grin.
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 said. "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.
Its models have been featured in the Brazilian edition of Vogue magazine and will be seen soon in Marie Claire. Last month, they shared the spotlight with supermodel Gisele Bundchen at Fashion Rio, one of the city's biggest fashion showcases.
"There is still a lot of discrimination against prostitutes, but things are changing," said Gabriela Leite, a trained sociologist and former prostitute who directs the Davida prostitute advocacy group that runs Daspu. "These women aren't hidden anymore. We are bringing them out into the open."
That's a dramatic turnaround for many of Daspu's models, who've grappled with years of shame and social persecution.
"When we were on television, people started coming up to me on the streets and saying, `Hey, you're that prostitute,'" said model Valkiria Pereira Costa. "I was expecting them to use that against me, but no, they were there giving me support. That's the first time that's happened to me."
Brazil's booming sex industry has long been a sensitive theme in a country known internationally for its sensuality but dominated by conservative social values.
Informal estimates suggest that there are hundreds of thousands of prostitutes in the country. A recent poll of 7,000 Brazilians found that 50 percent of men and 15 percent of women said they'd used the services of prostitutes. This year's runaway best-seller in Brazil is a memoir called "The Scorpion's Sweet Poison," which explicitly details the adventures of a call girl.
Raquel Pacheco, who wrote the book under the pseudonym Bruna the Little Surfer Girl, said women make up more than half of her book's buyers.
"There's a lot of curiosity about prostitutes," Pacheco said. "Women read the book for tips about what they can do at home. Men know very well what we do but still want to hear the stories."
Leite said she and others thought up Daspu last year after Brazil's government turned down $40 million in U.S. anti-AIDS funding that was conditioned on the country condemning commercial sex work.
"We talked a lot about this and laughed a lot about the stupidity of it, and then we started asking what we could do to raise our own money in our way," Leite said.
The idea stayed on paper until November, when Leite and her colleagues released Daspu's first line of T-shirts. Public consciousness about the fashion line soon grew, thanks to a much-publicized spat over its name, which is short for "das putas," or "of the whores" in Portuguese.
Daspu was meant as a send-up of Daslu, a Sao Paulo luxury megastore. The luxury store threatened to sue the prostitutes if they didn't change their line's name and then backed off after its threats were ridiculed in the news media.
"That was a very good thing for us," said Davida spokesman Flavio Lenz. "Because of that, the brand was known before there were really any clothes."
Daspu's goal isn't only selling clothes. It's also making people face up to the thorny issues surrounding Brazil's sex industry, Leite said.
The top priority is changing Brazilian laws that prohibit businesses from hiring prostitutes, a measure that she said forces women to work alone in often dangerous circumstances.
"The country accepts prostitution, but it also allows the exploitation of these women," Leite said. "It's part of this country's contradictions, where we're a sexual country, but we also want to punish sexuality."
The goal, Leite said, is to make prostitution like any other legal profession, with the same labor protections that other workers enjoy. "Anyone who says ... prostitution is outside the mainstream is fooling themselves," she said. "We've always been here and we're here to stay."
For Maria Nilec dos Santos, the past nine months with Daspu have been a happy coda to a 30-year career. Watching herself and the other prostitutes win some degree of social acceptance has been nothing less than life-changing, the 59-year-old woman said.
On the runway, Nilec dos Santos is the most relaxed and jubilant of the women, waving to the crowd and strutting with the flair of a grand dame.
"I didn't see this coming in my life," she said. "When I started out, I could have never imagined this ever happening to us. Now, I really believe people are coming around to us."
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(c) 2006, McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
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(C) 2006 Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.. All Rights Reserved
