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After meeting India's "sumangali girls," I'll never look at cute, cheap clothes the same way again.

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Strip off the gloss and you have a workforce of young women classified as independent contractors, not covered by minimum wage laws, who are often paid in clothes rather than cash, and are in debt to their modeling agencies.

Underneath global apparel's glitzy makeup lies an unglamorous underbelly - one of violent working conditions and structural faux pas. Case and point: factory fires. In September 2012, 300 garment workers lost their lives when a factory caught ablaze in Pakistan - two months later, 112 deaths after a similar tragedy in Bangladesh. Add China to the list, and 2012 will go on record as the deadliest year to be a garment worker.