Maya Khankhoje is a Mexican-born writer whose favourite bottled drink used to be "Tehuacan" mineral water.

Capitalism is perverse, and not just for the reasons invoked by the old man Marx and the new-style young anarchists of today. It is perverse because, inter alia, it is decadent, has no sense of aesthetics and is absolutely devoid of common sense. Why, it doesn't even have the sense to look up to nature or the past for inspiration in its search for beauty! Instead it relies on the perspiration of others to produce what it calls fashion and what any child would call waste.

Even the most sold-out capitalist cannot fail to see that waste is part of the scheme of things to keep the capitalist wheel churning greenbacks for the few from the greenery which used to belong to the many. Fashion is the main instrument used to render planned obsolescence even more obscene.

Take the current faded jeans fashion, for example. Blue jeans have solid credentials as the working man's attire: sturdy, with even sturdier copper rivets, they were instrumental in speeding-up the gold rush and in pushing back the frontiers of the “Wild” West, albeit to the detriment of native populations and the environment. They have also helped to level the differences separating little boys from little girls, although for that, having androgynous hips was of great help.

Now that the Chinese proletariat have abandoned denim in their bid to jump on the bandwagon of modernity, the smiling youth looking down on motorists from the billboards along the highways of the world have adopted it as their class uniform with a twist: for denims, or blue jeans or vaqueros to be considered fashionable they should be first dyed indigo, then stone washed to make them look faded, then dyed anew in beige or some other colour then wrinkled, then dyed again. And hang the consequences! Forget about polluted aquifers, toxic dermatitis, respiratory illnesses, miscarriages, cancer and the many ills that affect sweatshop workers.

Fashion could be fun, except that it isn’t. In fact, fashion in the city of Tehuacan, to the South East of Mexico City, has tragic consequences. The name of Tehuacan is derived from the Aztec word for "place of those who have God". It was the cradle of Mesoamerican agriculture and is richly dotted with artesian wells that have supported a mineral water bottling plant for generations.

Today the people of Tehuacan appear to have been forgotten by their God. Tehuacan has become an important garment producing centre, 60% of its 400 factories producing jeans for the US and Canadian markets. Guess, Levi's, Gap & Wranglers are but some of the brand names processed in the city. Blue jeans factories have displaced agriculture, forcing indigenous campesinos to leave the land in order to become cheap labour in sweatshops.

The production of blue jeans involves several stages. First the fabric is chosen (and let us not get into the subject of the toxic processes that "natural" cotton is subjected to) and then dyed with indigo. Indigo, a dye which as the name implies, originally came from India, used to be made from around 500 natural sources and at some point, was so highly prized that only royalty and the higher echelons of the church were allowed to wear it. Today indigo is made from toxic chemicals . The current world production of synthetic indigo is 17,000 tons per annum, 40 % of which is produced by BASF in Germany. Fortunately, there is a concurrent trend towards environmentally friendly "fashionable and chic blue dyes" but that is another story, because it is only the rich who can afford them.

The dyeing process is labour intensive and involves several layers of dye. First the cloth is dyed dark blue, then washed with a pumice stone to soften the fabric, then “polarized” with beige and yellow patches that are hand-stitched onto the fabric, then “over” dyed with shades of green and purple to give it a deeper hue, and the process goes on.

"We are at all times exposed to toxic substances- caustic soda and chlorine vapours, contact with enzymes, detergents, peroxide, oxalic acid, sodium bisulphate, etc.” -- worker in a laundry in Tehuacan.

Cloth isn’t the only thing that changes colour in the process. Lack of environmental controls in Mexico makes it possible to discharge dyes into adjacent water bodies, contaminating surface water that irrigates nearby farms. The dark blue colour of the water currents surrounding jeans factories in Tehuacan is the dangerous result of these unregulated discharges.

Dyed denim is then sent to cutters, some of them labour intensive, others automated. Seamstresses feed machines very carefully with thick denim pieces 12 hours a day. Young women who sew at high speeds with unusually high quotas tend to suffer from repetitive strain lesions, back problems and poor eyesight.

Jeans, once assembled, are sent for further chemical treatment.

New "dirty" jeans add a new phase of labour to the finishing process. Jeans are "wrinkled" by hand to create wrinkles in the dye, then scrubbed manually to remove the indigo and sponged to add colour. More expensive styles are first submerged in dyes, then baked in resin to retain their dark indigo, and to obtain an old and rigid appearance in the denim.

Another technique is stone bleaching and washing using enzymes to destroy the indigo. For example amylase is used to shrink jeans and soften the fabric. The cellulose weakens the cotton fibre before the jean is once again washed with pumice stone or other abrasive objects.

Laccase is a technique whereby chlorine is used to eliminate indigo dye from jeans to make them look used. During this stage of the process, polarization and "over dyeing" can be done by hand on each garment instead of as a whole in the cloth.

The last toxic step is drying and baking. Mexican workers in the laundries are often not protected from the toxic vapours issued by large driers, heaters and ovens.

Then the workers "label" the jeans and the treated denim is wrapped in plastic, packaged and sent to stores and distributors to the US and Canada.

What is the cost of this toxic fashion? Certainly greater than the price of a pair of blue jeans in a designer store. The cost can only be measured in terms of its deleterious effect on health, the contamination of aquifers and the destruction of agriculture.

And all for what? So that the children of The Bold and the Beautiful can look as if they are wearing hand-me-downs from the children of Les Miserables, at US $200 plus a throw. So that the young gods of the future can smile down from a giant billboard, one hand on their hip, the other one holding a bottle of Tehuacan mineral water, not clear and sparkling as it used to be, but murky blue, as blue as their faded jeans once were.