Tight knit : global families and the social life of fast fashion /

For her doctoral research in Prato, Italy, Krause (anthropology, Univ. of Massachusetts) worked with one of the many local families involved with clothing production. That was in the mid-1990s. Some 20 years later and back in Prato, Krause finds that clothes produced in the city still bear the label "Made in Italy," but Chinese immigrants dominate production, clothing is made cheaply within a global network of supplies and workers, and the idea of fashion seasons has given way to rapidly changing trends of fast fashion. Krause documents the situation with major sections of her book focused on economic issues concerning clothing and people (value, money, crisis), the embodied and familial dimensions of this global situation (including Chinese parents in Italy whose babies are raised by family back in China), and issues of racism, segregation, urban planning, and urban futures. Drawing on a range of contacts and a theoretically informed methodology that she calls encounter ethnography, Krause makes the current situation come alive with passages that introduce the reader to civic events and celebrations, health establishments, workshops and the often-nearby living quarters, city streets, and the people whose lives cross (or don't) in these settings. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers. --Carol Hendrickson, emerita, Marlboro College