From indigo dyeing and disappearing craft traditions to the mechanics of global fashion and the return of American manufacturing, these recent books examine clothing through material, cultural, and economic lenses. They offer deeper insight into how clothes are made, valued, and remembered – essential reading for anyone interested in denim, textiles, and the business of making.
Indigo and Resist Dyeing – Performance, Metaphor and Materiality in Contemporary Cloth
Drawing connections across disciplines from visual arts to anthropology, Linda Brassington provides a distinctly different alternative approach to the historical, technical and ethnographic accounts available. International case studies from traditional and contemporary artists, practitioners and performers take us through workshops, studios and dye rooms from England to Central Europe and Japan.
Steeped in this practical and contextual understanding of the process, Brassington probes the visual and sensory language of her practice, the cultural anthropology of its formation, and the metaphorical and personal resonances of its materials, techniques, rhythms, and performative gestures.
Hardcover, 224 pages
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/indigo-and-resist-dyeing-9781350423879/
Stetson: American Icon
Celebrating the style and heritage of Stetson, one of America’s oldest and most iconic brands, this beautiful book features the full range of its classic, handcrafted hats and the stylish ways cowboys and artists, movie stars and pop stars, jazz musicians and country singers have worn them over the years.
Heirloom objects, these hats are still handcrafted, and the book explores the couture-like way they’re created, including the many ways they can be customized and individually shaped.
With evocative archival imagery and glamorous advertisements tracing the history of the brand and highlighting key moments and trends in American history and culture along the way, and with essays by cultural historians contextualizing the significance of Stetson in American culture, this book is an exciting and stunning look at America’s most important heritage brand.
Hardcover, 321 pages
Capitalism’s Favorite Child – Global Fashion Business since 1850
Combining research methods from business and global history, Donzé and Wubs equip readers with a vital and expansive new analysis of the development of the global fashion industry from the mid-19th century to today.
Ranging across Europe, the Americas and Asia over two centuries, Donzé and Wubs bring the work of manufacturers and designers together with trade associations, fashion forecasters and retailers to investigate the transformations of this truly global business – ‘capitalism’s favorite child’ (Werner Sombart). New data and sources reveal unexpected threads and detail within even such well-trodden narratives as Chanel under the occupation, the Nylon revolution, and the retail strategy of United Colours of Benetton.
Featuring new work on unstudied areas from Swiss silk companies in East Asia to the influence of finance on modern fashion, this is the most global, long-term, and interconnected history of the industry to date.
Hardcover or Paperback, 304 pages
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/capitalisms-favorite-child-9781350109834/
Craftland – In Search of Lost Arts and Disappearing Trades
During an age of mass manufacturing, fast fashion, synthetic materials and the unsustainable practice of companies valuing quantity over quality, a return to tradition, connection, and simplicity is essential.
Art historian and award-winning broadcaster Dr. James Fox explores the rapidly fading crafts and artisanal traditions of the world—such as coopering, basket-weaving, wheelwrighting, metalwork, and blacksmithing—that have shaped so much of our history through their alchemy of the hand-made human touch and generational wisdom.
Part travelogue and part historical record, Craftland is a profoundly intimate meditation on our human cultural heritage, exploring what we lose as these traditions fade from view in the race of progress, and what we stand to gain if we bring them back.
Hardcover, 368
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/746828/craftland-by-james-fox/
On Loss and Absence: Textiles of Mourning and Survival
A journey through the rich histories of textiles that explores their significant cultural roles, from memorializing lost loved ones to resisting oppression
From ancient Egyptian shrouds to medieval relics, textiles have played both functional and symbolic roles in rituals of death across time and place. Featuring funeral hangings, mourning samplers, garments, and many other textiles and fragments, along with works by contemporary textile artists such as Nick Cave (b. 1959) and Angela Hennessey (b. 1971), this book highlights how these objects help people negotiate experiences of loss, grief, healing, and survival.
Hardcover, 208 pages
https://www.artic.edu/exhibitions/9772/on-loss-and-absence-textiles-of-mourning-and-survival
American Flannel: How a Band of Entrepreneurs Are Bringing the Art and Business of Making Clothes Back Home
“I can confidently say this will be one of my favorite books of 2024.” —Stephen King, bestselling author (and onetime millworker)
The little-engine-that-could story of how a band of scrappy entrepreneurs are reviving the enterprise of manufacturing clothing in the United States.
For decades, clothing manufacture was a pillar of U.S. industry. But beginning in the 1980s, Americans went from wearing 70 percent domestic-made apparel to almost none. Even the very symbol of American freedom and style—blue jeans—got outsourced. With offshoring, the nation lost not only millions of jobs but also crucial expertise and artistry.
Hardcover, 240 pages
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/665540/american-flannel-by-steven-kurutz/
