A former drummer in a riot-grrrl band, PHEONA DONOHOE is currently working in a music store in Chadstone Shopping Centre - the Melbourne suburban 'mega-plex'. Chadstone is ambitiously branded; every time Pheona gets on the store's loundspeaker she has to say the shop name, followed by "Fashion campital!".

This time last year Pheona was hanging out far from Chadstone: in El Paso, Texas. Downtown El Paso sits at the foot of a mountain range and the city sprawls either side. Across a dry riverbed lies Juarez, Mexico.; a bridge over the border links these places.

While in El Paso, a friend invited Pheona to her parents' house, where she soon became a regular: "Her mother Sylvia would teach me bits of Spanish and how to cook real Mexican food. She also took me across the border to Juarez, where her mother - my friend's grandmother - still lives."

From Sylvia, Pheona learnt about the murdered and missing women of Juarez.

Juarez is a "frontier town": while American teenagers go there to scoff cheap Tequila, organised drug cartels use it as a base for smuggling operations. The industrial district hosts 300 assembling factories - maquiladoras - for multinational corporations; much of their transient labour force is made of young women who have ravelled from rural Mexico to find work. This is the underside of consumer culture in the world's 'fashion capitals'.

The bodies of women, maquiladora workers and others, are regularly found dumped in the surrounding Chihuahua desert. Kidnapped and gang-raped before murder, the police make only cursory attempts at investigating their deaths, a fact that has prompted substantive allegations of collusion and cover-up.

While in El Paso, Pheona felt unable to do much to help: "My Spanish was so terrible I couldn't volunteer at Casa Amiga, the rape crisis centre [in Juarez]. I was also living off my credit card so didn't have any money to donate."

Now back in Melbourne Pheona has commissioned a series of limited edition T-shirts from four artists/designers - FLIQ (Burn), Reuben Stanton (Absent), Sara Bowyer (Tattoo Magic) and Chantel Camilleri (Hunter Gatherer). Made under non-sweatshop conditions the Ts will be on sale at an upcoming screening of the documentary Senorita Extraviada (Young Missing Women) on August 31 at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne, and the remainder in Hunter Gatherer shops in St Kilda and Fitzroy. Proceeds go to Casa Amiga. - EVE VINCENT