Booted from Fashion Week, Dictator's Daughter is Venue-Shopping

After IMG, the organizers of New York City's Fashion Week decided to cancel the show of Gulnara Karimova over her association with the autocratic Uzbek regime, she began shopping for a more amenable venue.

Now the daughter of Uzbekistan's dictator Islam Karimov is planning to relocate her disgraced show to the posh restaurant and event space Cipriani, the New York Post reported:

Next up on the menu at Cipriani: hot potato!

Gulnara Karimova, the fashion-designing daughter of Uzbekistan’s ruthless dictator, aims to stage her runway show at upscale restaurant Cipriani after getting booted from Mercedes Benz Fashion Week, The Post has learned.

After protests from human rights groups and pickets by Uzbek émigrés about torture, political imprisonment and forced child labor, IMG said it was "horrified" and first ask Karimova to withdraw voluntarily. When she didn't, the Fashion Week organizers abruptly disinvited her.

IMG is said now to be in negotiations about a refund of $30,000 in rental fees, only a portion of the funds that Karimova had shelled out to display her Guli ethnic clothing line, says the Post.

As she was searching for a location, Karimova also reportedly reached out to a number of friendly foreign missions, including those of Russia, Spain and the United Arab Emirates. The Uzbek president appointed his daughter as ambassador to Spain and also envoy to UN organizations in Geneva.

Cipriani, which hasn't confirmed the event according to the Post, has itself been with the owner having pled guilty to $10 million in tax evasion.

Despite the cancellation, a coalition of labor and human rights groups vowed to stage their picket of Fashion Show on September 15 to call on the apparel industry not to source cotton in Uzbekistan.

Already more than 60 US and European companies and a major industry association have pledged not to use Uzbek cotton and have called on Tashkent to allow the International Labor Organization to inspect the cotton fields during the harvest, Responsible Sourcing Network reported.

This article originally appeared on Choihona at EurasiaNet.