Coded within the video are allusions to the fascist activities of the fashion house Hugo Boss AG during the Third Reich era, when an elite workforce of seamsters and seamstresses was specially assembled from all over Nazi-occupied areas of Europe, to work as poorly paid forced labour, making uniforms in the Boss Metzingen workshop, in Germany.

The general public was only first made aware of this scandal in 1997, when the name Hugo Ferdinand Boss appeared in Swiss bank account lists from the Nazi period. Hugo Boss has since only paid the absolute minimum required compensation into a fund set up by the German government but it is unlikely that the few surviving victims will ever receive reimbursement, given the late decision to undertake anything and the slow machines of bureaucracy.

The Boss credo of re-writing the rulebook to suit one's personal needs, is reflected in their current German television advertising campaign 2004, for Hugo Boss eau de toilette: accompanying the voice-over: "your fragrance, your rules", a tattooed youth holds up the palm of his hand close to the camera, where one can read the handwritten statement: "your rules". Tanya Ury parodies this with her hand-sewn testimony "Boss".

The video imagery also refers to the photography of Daniel Buetti, where a variety of fashion logos appear to be sewn into the fashion model´s skin; Buetti's working process does not in fact, involve any kind of injury to the model: his photographic images, having had holes punched through from the back, are then re-photographed.

Tanya Ury