Slave labor in the American South supplied factories in both England, where they were notorious for child labor and other horrors, and the United States, where factory fires took the lives of recent immigrants at the turn of the 20th century. The defining product of the Industrial Revolution, textiles were crucial to the development of our globalized capitalist system, and its abuses today are built on a long history. Throughout, Thomas reminds us that the textile industry has always been one of the darkest corners of the world economy. ‘Red Comet’: Heather Clark’s new biography of the poet Sylvia Plath is daring, meticulously researched and unexpectedly riveting.‘Intimacies’: Katie Kitamura’s novel follows an interpreter at The Hague who is dealing with loss, an uncertain relationship and an insecure world.‘On Juneteenth’: Annette Gordon-Reed explores the racial and social complexities of Texas, her home state, weaving history and memoir.‘How Beautiful We Were’: Imbolo Mbue’s second novel is a tale of a casually sociopathic corporation and the people whose lives it steamrolls.Lastly, she meets people who are trying to reform the system entirely, from the materials we use to how clothes are produced and the ways we shop.Įditors at The Times Book Review selected the best fiction and nonfiction titles of the year. The second presents alternative, even opposite, approaches to making clothing that Thomas terms “slow fashion”: locally grown materials, often domestically manufactured or sourced on a relatively small scale, like the farmer and entrepreneur Sarah Bellos’s American-grown indigo. It includes a fascinating account of how NAFTA made possible the international success of fast fashion.
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The first focuses on today’s global fast-fashion and regular fashion industries and how they came to be so enormous, voracious, so seemingly uncontainable. Her narrative is broken up into three manageable sections. In “Fashionopolis,” Dana Thomas, a veteran style writer, convincingly connects our fast-fashion wardrobes to global economic and climate patterns and crises, rooting the current state of the fashion biosphere as a whole - production methods, labor practices and environmental impacts - in the history of the garment industry. And it is Zara and other brands like it that have helped plant flags on the farthest reaches of the planet.