The Model Agent star Erin O'Connor is fast becoming the ethical and moral face of fashion – having spoken out against the size 0 ideal - and also campaigning on behalf of impoverished garment makers in India.
The 31-year-old flew out to Delhi recently where she visited workers from the Self-Employed Women's Association – an organisation that is trying to improve the lives of seamstresses in the country.
The women who flock to the Rajiv Nagar Embroidery centres in Delhi are home workers and although highly skilled, they are on the bottom rung of the fast fashion industry, which supplies garments to most of the high street stores.
They live hand to mouth, presided over by middlemen – the tyrannical go-betweens who hand out some of the lowest wages in the garment industry.
Erin O'Connor is hoping to change all of this by working to highlight the plight of these women and the daily challenges they face, according to a report in The Daily Mail.
Ethical clothing has suffered from an image problem in the past, but Miss O'Connor plans to change public perceptions about the industry.
She explained: "I had previously been a very enthusiastic consumer and I didn't think about the origins of garments enough. The thing is when you see a bejewelled pen from Monsoon or a top in Gap that requires embroidery; you cannot believe that it is made by a pair of very determined hands, and that it can be time consuming.
"I think there is some resistance when people talk about ethical fashion, and a tendency to panic that if you're bringing a moral agenda and highlighting the origins of the garment, you can't incorporate style. But there's no reason why style and conscience can't co-exist.
"The charity is trying to empower the lowest paid in the industry by cutting out the layers of middle men involved, and sourcing contracts directly from some of the world's biggest fashion companies."
O'Connor says that she has been humbled by the skill and hours of intensive labour that go into making clothing for stores.
She added: "These women know they are doing a very good job and SEWA's found a production model that is working. This should get bigger and bigger."
She has close links to Ireland - her father is from Ballycastle in Co. Antrim. But now her eye is firmly fixed on the East and helping SEWA to promote better practices among clothing companies in India.
O'Connor is increasingly being heard as the voice of reason in the fashion industry. She is vice chair of the British Fashion Council, and set up the Model Sanctuary, which offers respite and a full-time nutritionist (crucially, since the size-zero storm) to her very young colleagues, where she "plays mother hen".
"These are really young people," she says with feeling. "They don't always realise that they need to set their own boundaries."
Worth £12m according to the Sunday Times Rich List, she has made her name at opposite ends of the fashion spectrum: couture loves her height, strong features and ability to inhabit a character, but more recently she has become the M&S poster girl and thus the darling of the high street.
