The scene one recent summer evening in a third-floor conference room at the Standard Hotel in New York City seemed like the usual: stylish people drinking white wine, ignoring expansive views of the Hudson River. The first clue that all was not as it seemed was the swag: At a table near the door, assistants were handing out—instead of free lip gloss or liquor—books and DVDs with titles like “The Silent Revolution: Sankalp and the Quarry Slaves.” Fashion designer Elie Tahari was there, along with André Balazs, the hotel’s owner. So was someone wearing silk harem pants. So was someone wearing a dashiki.

Had the room somehow been double-booked for a Prada show and a microfinance conference? Eventually, Katie Ford, the former CEO of Ford Models, rose and ordered the guests to turn off their cellphones. She wanted to talk about human trafficking—the modern-day slave trade by which, according to some estimates, 27 million people are held in bondage, netting the bad guys some $40 billion. “You say something is slave-free, and people look at you like, ‘Duh, of course it’s slave-free,’ ” Ford began. “It doesn’t even enter our consciousness.”

Katie Ford, abolitionist: A skeptic might detect a certain irony in the idea of someone who once told a reporter, “We can eyeball a measurement to within an inch,” dedicating her life to fighting against the exploitation of young, impressionable women (and men). But to Ford, who in 2007 sold most of her stake in the family business to the private equity firm Stone Tower Equity, her new life as a nearly full-time, unpaid, roving ambassador for the cause is an outgrowth of her former work, rather than a repudiation of it, or an atonement. Her interest in the cause began last year, when a representative of the United Nations called to ask if she would participate in a women’s leadership group that was studying human trafficking. “I said, ‘I can’t come talk about it, because I don’t know anything about it!’ ” Ford recalls. “But I went, and after two hours, I knew why I was there. The way people traffic across borders is parallel to the way we recruit models.” Ford had planned to start a philanthropic foundation dedicated to preserving indigenous cultures, which she had been interested in since the age of 10, when she heard a cassette tape of African bushmen speaking in their distinctive clicking language. Instead, she immersed herself in learning about human trafficking, which, she realized, was a cause that perfectly matched her skill set. “The target age is 14 to 24, and so it’s similar to modeling,” Ford says. “I knew how to reach that market.” She continues, “It was the feeling of: There but for the grace of God… The girls who came to us could have been those girls.”

Young girls and international business—it is Ford’s unusual position at the juncture of slavery’s concentric spheres that make her an effective, and not totally counterintuitive, advocate for its eradication. The Ford model Patricia Velásquez, who grew up in Venezuela, recalls traveling with Ford to a job in Montenegro. “We were in the market, and the women were so beautiful,” Velásquez remembers. “I said, ‘Why don’t you stop that girl?’ and Katie said, ‘No, you can’t do that here, because they think models are whores.’ She has a good understanding of how different cultures respond to different situations.” And of the way that governments and bureaucracies can help or hinder the flow of people across borders: She was once involved in lobbying Congress to grant more skilled-worker visas for foreign models.

“Anytime I call and say, ‘Katie, please, Katie, do you think you could?’ she’s always willing to help.”
–Dr. Aleya Hammad.

Sitting in the lobby of the Mercer Hotel, Ford—who, at 50-something, is coltish yet stern, and is wearing a simple white tank top and jeans (no rings, no watch)—reels off statistics (Japan is the top slave user among rich nations) and terms (“source countries,” “social auditing”) with the meandering gravitas of an undergraduate who has stayed up all night reading Chomsky. She brings to the cause the zeal not only of a novitiate but also of a high-powered Manhattan mother whose two daughters are almost grown-up. (The aforementioned André Balazs is her ex-husband.) Touring a rough settlement in the Wayúu region of Venezuela, Velásquez says, Ford kept wandering off to talk to villagers, to the consternation of her bodyguards, who found it “really, really hard to keep up.” Last year, for Ford Models’ annual Supermodel of the World contest, she had models record warnings about human trafficking in eight languages, including Portuguese and Tagalog. Dr. Aleya Hammad, of End Human Trafficking Now, notes that Ford was instrumental in setting up a hotline in Geneva for victims of human trafficking. “Anytime I call and say, ‘Katie, please, Katie, do you think you could?’ she’s always willing to help,” Dr. Hammad says.

Crucially, Ford’s cred spans social territories as well as physical ones. “A lot of the NGOs are really good, but they just don’t know how to reach people,” she says of her role as a bridge between those who want to do good and those who want to do well. Recently, between travels to Cairo and to Vienna for conferences on slavery, she has been working her old Rolodex in order to persuade the heads of New York’s major fashion houses that trafficking is a problem with which they should be concerned. She has been, she says, 95 percent successful—with the exception of a few men who responded, sarcastically, “Oh, I’m in favor of slavery.”

Dan Viederman, the executive director of Verité, says, “There’s a legitimacy to Katie’s presentation that comes from the fact that she has been in business her whole life and doesn’t have to be perceived as just a bleeding heart.” His organization performs reviews for companies such as Gap and Levi’s to ensure that their supply chains are slavery-free, in hopes of fending off the sort of corporate nightmares that ensued, for instance, for chocolate manufacturers, when it emerged that significant amounts of the world’s cocoa were being farmed by child slaves in West Africa. (Many of them are now working toward getting certification that their practices are fair.)

Ford may have made her biggest connection at a fundraiser last year in honor of a certain senator’s wife, now the First Lady. Ford recalls, “I went up to Michelle and explained that I was formerly the head of Ford Models and sold my business and was she aware that there were over 27 million slaves in the world? and she listened and said, ‘You went into that?’ ”

URL to article: http://magazine.wsj.com/hunter/second-chapter/trade-union/