Bono flies into Auckland this week, but his wife Ali Hewson has been busy in Africa relaunching their ethical fashion company.
As schools go in Africa's second-biggest slum, the children of Bidii Nursery are lucky. They're in class from 8am to 3pm and are fed basic meals. There are 90 of them, aged one to seven; 35 are orphans. The school roll includes kids who don't seem to even have a second name: Robert, Dennis, Brian.
The children have to share five teachers and one small room. The walls are bright with posters featuring lists of English words. The floor is hard-packed earth. The toilet is a flyblown hut out back.
This is Kibera, a jam-packed mass of corrugated iron roofs, mud walls, twisty alleyways, 1.5 million people and no running water. It is a city within a city - Kibera billows out from the edge of Nairobi, capital of Kenya. Some Westerners might know it from The Constant Gardener, the 2005 film about the corrupt practices of first-world pharmaceutical companies.
That's how I "knew" Kibera. But obviously I didn't really know it. The smell, the smoke, the crunch and squelch underfoot of rubbish and gnawed cornhusks, scrubby patches of brussels sprouts, people crammed everywhere. The shop-shacks selling buckets of coal, handfuls of potatoes, grooming, surgery: Ongare Success Shop; Humble Beginnings Salon and Beauty Shop; Bongo Vibes Pub; Family Planning & Circumcision. It is a lot to take in.
Ali Hewson - perhaps better known as Mrs Bono - had no direct experience of the poverty in Kenya either. In 1985, shortly after U2's career-making performance at Live Aid, she and her husband Bono went to Ethiopia. In 2005, she visited Lesotho, to check out the factories which Edun, the couple's ethical fashion company, had established in the southern African kingdom. I was with her on that trip. Lesotho, a small mountain state decimated by Aids and unemployment, was overwhelming too.
But Kenya is new to her. She is here to visit Made, a fair-trade jewellery and accessories company established in London in 2005 by Bristol-born Gerson Barnett and his Italian wife, the designer Cristina Cisilino. Made wanted to use African skills and African raw materials - many of them reclaimed and repurposed - to create hand-made products for Western boutiques and chainstores. And to create jobs for African people.
In 2007, Cisilino and Barnett moved to Nairobi. Now they employ 65 local people to make necklaces, earrings, bracelets and bags that are sold in Whistles, Topshop and John Lewis. They play to the strengths of their Kenyan craftspeople: the Luo tribe are adept at metalwork, the Masai know how to work beads. And they work with visiting collaborators, such as Dutch jewellery designer Natalie Dissel and Livia Firth, the wife of Colin Firth and co-owner of Eco boutique in London, using locally sourced and recycled raw materials.
Hewson wants to see how Made does things: how it runs as a business, how it turns the profits back to the local people.
"They're very forward-thinking," she says.
Hewson is impressed with "how they make everything here on the ground, from the bone beads to casting their own little parts for necklaces and bags. That's very exciting - we can send our creative director here and she can work with them."
Hewson is also in Africa to kick-start the relaunch, five years after its inception, of Edun. Despite the deep pockets which she, Bono and his brother Norman Hewson used to launch the company; despite the input of well-regarded New York designer Rogan Gregory; despite the clout of the world's biggest rock star, it wasn't enough to make Edun the trailblazing profitable, ethical, desirable fashion brand Hewson wanted it to be.
In 2007, the three shareholders had to pour money into the company, and in 2008, Edun parted company with Gregory and slipped off the fashion radar.
Then, last year, the luxury-goods conglomerate Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy (LVMH) bought a 49 per cent stake in Edun. A new creative director was hired: Paris-based, Northern Irish designer Sharon Wauchob. And a new chief executive was appointed: Janice Sullivan, a no-nonsense fashion pro with stints at Calvin Klein and Donna Karan on her CV, came in to oversee Edun's New York headquarters.
Edun has come a long way since its beginnings. In early 2005, I met Hewson, now 49, and Bono, now 50, who she started dating at school in Dublin 35 years ago. They were launching Edun with a photoshoot for Vogue just outside of Dublin. Edun was Hewson's initiative, but Bono (no surprise) was doing the talking.
"Having been involved in political processes," he told me, "you start to realise that revolution isn't going to happen with a big gang of people storming the Bastille any more. Change comes in tiny steps before it makes a big jump. And those tiny steps are people deciding where they spend their money. Shopping is becoming a political act. People are seeing that with their dollar or their pound, they can change a lot."
As well as Edun-branded items aimed at the purses of fashion-forward women in New York, Paris and London, there would be Edun Live, a diffusion line making African-sourced T-shirts. These bulk items would target the concert-merchandise business; U2 (of course) and Coldplay were lined up as early customers.
"We're just trying to do the right thing, and effect some change, without throwing a few bricks through a few windows," added Hewson. For all her previous campaigning experience - against the radioactivity that drifted across the Irish Sea from Sellafield, in support of the Belarus children poisoned by Chernobyl - and certainly compared with her rabble-rousing hubbie, the mother-of-four was a quiet, and quietly stylish, presence. She said she didn't want her four children wearing clothes "that they don't know where they came from. We're offering a choice: these clothes are made with respect for the people who made them."
So Edun would be sourcing organic cotton in Peru, making denim in Tunisia, and machining clothes in Lesotho. Hence my trip with Hewson to the latter country a couple of months later. The Clothing Zone factory in the small border town of Butha-Buthe was housed in a former brewery. It employed dozens of local women on a fair wage in a well-ventilated environment. It was no sweatshop. At the town's Qalo high school, $10 from every Edun Live T-shirt sold would help build a water well. Butha-Buthe and Clothing Zone were a model for how Edun, on a macro level, might start changing the way the fashion industry operates.
Except it didn't work out that way. Sometime after a subsequent visit Hewson and Bono made to Butha-Buthe in May 2006, Clothing Zone closed. Why?
"There was some ..." begins Hewson as we sit down to talk in her quiet Nairobi hotel at the end of a hectic day. She sips herbal tea throughout our interview and juggles phone calls from one (or more) of her children. "We were the only people in there giving orders in the end. And it was slowly being wound down."
She believes the South African owner, for motives she professes not to know, "was basically not paying attention to it". There were further factory problems at another site in Lesotho, in Uganda and in Madagascar.
Hewson also concedes that the Edun "mission" overshadowed the product. What does that mean?
"We had a very pure idea that we wanted to work in Africa. So we brought our designers here [to Africa] and said, 'This is what you have to work with - they can do that stitch, they can use this material, and you can't have that button because we can't get it from here to there in time ...' So we really limited the designers."
Edun hadn't quite reverted to the outmoded cliche of overly worthy, ethically groovy clothes - dungarees woven from hemp, hairshirts made of guilt - but "we just didn't pay enough attention to the aesthetic. It's important that we have beautiful clothes, and the mission part is secondary to that."
The net result was that in late 2007, it was reported that Edun had US$3.6 ($4.6) million in outstanding bank loans while the three shareholders were owed $7.9 million. Not an issue, insists Hewson, and not just because she and Bono can well afford it. (U2's 360° tour was the highest-grossing tour in the world last year, taking US$311 million from 44 concerts; they'll have more than doubled that by the end of their current tour.)
Edun is a "very strong business, a very ambitious business", she says. "The first five years of the company is about putting money in and building the trade. So of course we had to support it.
"We're still here supporting it now, because we believe in it. But yeah," she says in the smiley, even way she says everything, "it hasn't made money - it hasn't made a profit yet. But it's growing. It's growing."
It's growing with the help of LVMH, the luxury-goods house responsible for, its titular brands aside, Krug champagne, Glenmorangie whisky, TAG Heuer watches, Givenchy, Marc Jacobs, Dior and several other top-flight fashion labels.
Ali Hewson and Bono first met LVMH's all-powerful chief executive Bernard Arnault in mid-2007. The Paris-based fashion mogul came "with other friends of ours" to "our house" for lunch - probably the Hewsons' villa in the south of France, where the family spend time every summer. "He understood that there's a coming demand for ethically responsible clothing. So he was very interested in what we were doing, and wanted to know more. We met a couple of times after that, and it just took a while to sign the papers."
Over two years, in fact. But Hewson knew it was worth the long haul. "We knew we needed LVMH's muscle, its business know-how. Because what we were trying to do was really too pioneering. We weren't able to produce or deliver on time."
Did they really need its cash as well?
"Absolutely," Hewson fires back. Edun had to "reinforce" its staff, shake up its organisation, step up its game.
Now it has an operation in China - a global manufacturing powerhouse, but one known for its questionable labour practices. So has Edun sold out its ethical principles? No, she insists.
The "single biggest negotiation" between Hewson and Bono's lawyer and LVMH's legal team was over a compliance manual: a set of rules codifying certain standards that must be upheld by Edun: "The ability to come and go within the facility [ie: no locked doors], you can't take workers' passports ... "
The Edun team was convinced that LVMH would follow through on the smaller company's founding principles.
"And we always felt that they are honourable people - and the company is, completely. It's run in such a tight, ethical way. It's been an amazing company to be part of. Really supportive."
So Edun has come a long way.
Manhattan is a useful base for the family. Hewson and Bono's eldest children, daughters Jordan, 21, and Eve, 18, are studying at Columbia and NYU; U2's touring schedule made the east coast of America a good hub; and Hewson has been able to keep in close contact with the Edun base in the funky Tribeca neighbourhood, monitoring the post-LVMH overhaul.
Not everyone is happy with the arrangement. Mum might be enjoying the daily walks across Central Park with her sons to their "really rigorous" Jewish school on the Upper East Side. But Elijah, 10, and John, nine, are missing their friends. They want to go home to Ireland, "fast".
Bono, agit-rocker extraordinaire, is well used to the snarky comments of those turned off by his grandstanding.
"He's always been sanguine about it," says Hewson. "He's always known, if you wanna get anything done you've got to stand in the firing line sometimes. He doesn't do it for the warm fuzzy feelings. He does it to actually bring some change about, and highlight issues that were being pushed under the carpet. And he does it very effectively. But," she adds, they both understand public fatigue at celebrity charity agitators. "Bono will say to you, 'I'm sick of Bono, and I am Bono'."
Five years ago, Hewson told me she was uncomfortable with being a spokeswoman for Edun; with using her celebrity currency, such as it was. How does she feel now? "I suppose I'm more comfortable with it," she replies slowly, not sounding that comfortable. "But I still just want the clothes to stand for themselves."
She wants to make a statement with fashion, but not in the way one might expect from the stereotype of a rock star wife.
"I've always wanted this company to be about the clothes and what it's doing. And not really about me. I much prefer to be in the background on everything."
Yet she is savvy enough to know that's impossible. From a PR point of view, she is one of Edun's greatest assets. But she'll keep putting her boots on the ground, inspecting the supply chain: after Kenya, she's off to a remote corner of Uganda to oversee an Edun fashion shoot, and to meet representatives of a cotton farmers' collective that the label is supporting.
The founding vision to help Africa help itself - business not charity, trade not aid, the fishing rod not the fish - drives her on. And then, as soon as possible, she'll be on a plane back to her kids in New York.
So, in five years, what has Ali Hewson learnt about fashion?
"How tough it is!' she laughs. "I had no idea. It's a business you have to be passionate about. Or you just won't be able to stick it."
The stakes are high. If Edun doesn't work this time, Ali Hewson and Bono will have lost a few million from their huge fortune. But people in Kenya and Uganda will have lost a lot more.
"They don't have an income. That's what's heartbreaking about factories that we've worked with closing. Hopefully, as Edun continues to grow, we can rectify some of that. Because it's people's lives. It's people's lives," Hewson repeats.
"You see it in those kids today in that school. Made is doing an incredible thing supporting that school. Those are the things that do change people's lives forever."
* To see and buy the Edun range, visit edunonline.com
- INDEPENDENT
