Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
19
result(s) for
"Clothing trade United States History 20th century."
Sort by:
The hidden history of American fashion : rediscovering twentieth-century women designers
This book is the first in-depth exploration of the revolutionary designers who defined American fashion in its emerging years and helped build an industry with global impact, yet who have been largely forgotten. While names such as Charles James, Oscar de la Renta, Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein are familiar, their once-eminent forebears have been largely erased from the canon of fashion history in the United States. From one of America's first couturiers, Jessie Franklin Turner, to Zelda Wynn Valdes, who dressed the likes of Josephine Baker and Ella Fitzgerald, the book captures the lost histories of the luminaries who paved the way in the world of American fashion design. Focusing on unsung female designers, the authors reclaim a place in history for the women who contributed to the rich tapestry of the industry as it stands today, including designers who dressed celebrities and socialites, and millions of fashion-conscious American women. This lavishly illustrated collection takes us from Hollywood to Broadway, from sportswear to sustainable fashion, and explores important crossovers between film, theater, and fashion, including couture, tailoring, millinery, costume, and accessory design. Uncovering fascinating histories of the design pioneers we should know about, the book enlarges the prevailing narrative of fashion history and will be an important reference for fashion students, historians, costume curators, and fashion enthusiasts alike.
Book
Making Sweatshops
The only comprehensive historical analysis of the globalization of the U.S. apparel industry, this book focuses on the reemergence of sweatshops in the United States and the growth of new ones abroad. Ellen Israel Rosen, who has spent more than a decade investigating the problems of America's domestic apparel workers, now probes the shifts in trade policy and global economics that have spawned momentous changes in the international apparel and textile trade.Making Sweatshopsasks whether the process of globalization can be promoted in ways that blend industrialization and economic development in both poor and rich countries with concerns for social and economic justice-especially for the women who toil in the industry's low-wage sites around the world. Rosen looks closely at the role trade policy has played in globalization in this industry. She traces the history of current policies toward the textile and apparel trade to cold war politics and the reconstruction of the Pacific Rim economies after World War II. Her narrative takes us through the rise of protectionism and the subsequent dismantling of trade protection during the Reagan era to the passage of NAFTA and the continued push for trade accords through the WTO. Going beyond purely economic factors, this valuable study elaborates the full historical and political context in which the globalization of textiles and apparel has taken place. Rosen takes a critical look at the promises of prosperity, both in the U.S. and in developing countries, made by advocates for the global expansion of these industries. She offers evidence to suggest that this process may inevitably create new and more extreme forms of poverty.
eBook
Making sweatshops
The only comprehensive historical analysis of the globalization of the U.S. apparel industry, this book focuses on the reemergence of sweatshops in the United States and the growth of new ones abroad. Ellen Israel Rosen, who has spent more than a decade investigating the problems of America's domestic apparel workers, now probes the shifts in trade policy and global economics that have spawned momentous changes in the international apparel and textile trade. Making Sweatshops asks whether the process of globalization can be promoted in ways that blend industrialization and economic development
Publication
Fashion lives : Fashion Icons With Fern Mallis
\"No topic is off-limits to Fern Mallis, award-winning creator of the Fashion Week in New York, when she hosts 'Fashion Icons with Fern Mallis' at New York's ... 92nd Street Y, a series of ... interviews with the fashion industry's most talented, successful, and legendary personalities. Featuring nineteen ... interviews with American fashion luminaries, this ... book introduces readers to the real artists behind these very public figures\"--Front cover inside flap.
Book
Making War, Making Women
Drawing on war propaganda, popular advertising, voluminous government records, and hundreds of letters and other accounts written by women in the 1940s, Melissa A. McEuen examines how extensively women's bodies and minds became \"battlegrounds\" in the U.S. fight for victory in World War II. Women were led to believe that the nation's success depended on their efforts-not just on factory floors, but at their dressing tables, bathroom sinks, and laundry rooms. They were to fill their arsenals with lipstick, nail polish, creams, and cleansers in their battles to meet the standards of ideal womanhood touted in magazines, newspapers, billboards, posters, pamphlets and in the rapidly expanding pinup genre. Scrutinized and sexualized in new ways, women understood that their faces, clothes, and comportment would indicate how seriously they took their responsibilities as citizens. McEuen also shows that the wartime rhetoric of freedom, democracy, and postwar opportunity coexisted uneasily with the realities of a racially stratified society. The context of war created and reinforced whiteness, and McEuen explores how African Americans grappled with whiteness as representing the true American identity. Using perspectives of cultural studies and feminist theory, Making War, Making Women offers a broad look at how women on the American home front grappled with a political culture that used their bodies in service of the war effort.
eBook
Fabricating consumers
Since its early days of mass production in the 1850s, the sewing machine has been intricately connected with the global development of capitalism. Andrew Gordon traces the machine's remarkable journey into and throughout Japan, where it not only transformed manners of dress, but also helped change patterns of daily life, class structure, and the role of women. As he explores the selling, buying, and use of the sewing machine in the early to mid-twentieth century, Gordon finds that its history is a lens through which we can examine the modern transformation of daily life in Japan. Both as a tool of production and as an object of consumer desire, the sewing machine is entwined with the emergence and ascendance of the middle class, of the female consumer, and of the professional home manager as defining elements of Japanese modernity.
eBook
When Broadway Was the Runway
Selected byChoicemagazine as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2009When Broadway Was the Runwayexplores the central and largely unacknowledged role of commercial Broadway theater in the birth of modern American fashion and consumer culture. Long before Hollywood's red carpet spectacles, Broadway theater introduced American women to the latest styles. At the beginning of the twentieth century, theater impresarios captured the imagination of their largely female patrons by transforming the stage into a glorious site of consumer spectacle. Theater historian Marlis Schweitzer examines how these impresarios presented the dresses actresses wore onstage, as well as the jewelry and hairstyles they chose, as commodities that were available for purchase in nearby department stores and salons. The Merry Widow Hat, designed for the hit operetta of the same name, sparked an international craze, and the dancer Irene Castle became a fashion celebrity when she anticipated the flapper look of the 1920s by nearly a decade. Not only were the latest styles onstage, but advertisements appeared throughout theaters, in programs, and on the curtains, while magazines such asVoguevied for the rights to publish theatrical costume sketches andHarper's Bazarenticed readers with photo spreads of actresses in couture. This combination of spectatorship and consumption was a crucial step in the formation of a mass market for consumer goods and the rise of the cult of celebrity. Through historical analysis and dozens of early photographs and illustrations, Schweitzer aims a spotlight at the cultural and economic convergence of the theater and fashion industries in the United States.
eBook
Sewn in Coal Country
By the mid-1930s, Pennsylvania's anthracite coal industry was
facing a steady decline. Mining areas such as the Wyoming Valley
around the cities of Wilkes-Barre and Pittston were full of willing
workers (including women) who proved irresistibly attractive to New
York City's \"runaway shops\"-ladies' apparel factories seeking lower
labor and other costs. The International Ladies' Garment Workers'
Union (ILGWU) soon followed, and the Valley became a thriving hub
of clothing production and union activity. This volume tells the
story of the area's apparel industry through the voices of men and
women who lived it.
Drawing from an archive of over sixty audio-recorded interviews
within the Northeastern Pennsylvania Oral and Life History
Collection, Sewn in Coal Country showcases sixteen stories
told by workers, shop owners, union leaders, and others. The
interview subjects recount the ILGWU-led movement to organize the
shops, the conflicts between the district union and the national
office in New York, the solidarity unionism approach of leader Min
Matheson, the role of organized crime within the business, and the
failed efforts to save the industry in the 1980s and 1990s. Robert
P. Wolensky places the narratives in the larger context of American
clothing manufacturing during the period and highlights their
broader implications for the study of labor, gender, the working
class, and oral history.
Highly readable and thoroughly enlightening, this significant
contribution to the study of labor history and women's history will
appeal to anyone interested in the relationships among workers,
unions, management, and community; the effects of economic change
on an area and its residents; the role of organized crime within
the industry; and Pennsylvania history-especially the social
history of industrialization and deindustrialization during the
twentieth century.
eBook
The Triangle Fire
\"Leon Stein's gripping narrative of the Triangle tragedy is one of the classics of American history. As the grandson of a onetime Triangle seamstress, I salute the reissue of a book that anyone who cares about labor, past or present, should read.\"-Michael Kazin, Georgetown University, author of The Populist Persuasion: An American History and other books
Praise for the 1962 edition- \"Stein recreates the tragic events of the fire in all their dramatic intensity. His moving account is a work of dedication.\"-New York Times Book Review
\"With commendable restraint, Stein uses newspapers, official documents, and the evidence of survivors to unfold a story made more harrowing by the unemotional simplicity of its narration.\"-Library Journal
\"Stein... suggests that the fire alerted the public to shocking working conditions all over the city and helped the unions organize the clothing industry, but his good taste keeps him from selling the reader any silver lining. A by-product of the careful research that has gone into this excellent narrative is an interesting sketch of the hard lives and times of working girls in the days when the business of America was business.\"-New Yorker
March 25, 2011, marks the centennial of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, in which 146 garment workers lost their lives. A work of history relevant for all those who continue the fight for workers' rights and safety, this edition of Leon Stein's classic account of the fire features a substantial new foreword by the labor journalist Michael Hirsch, as well as a new appendix listing all of the victims' names, for the first time, along with addresses at the time of their death and locations of their final resting places.
March 25, 2011, marks the centennial of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, in which 146 garment workers lost their lives. A work of history relevant for all those who continue the fight for workers' rights and safety, this edition of Leon Stein's classic account of the fire features a substantial new foreword by the labor journalist Michael Hirsch, as well as a new appendix listing all of the victims' names, for the first time, along with addresses at the time of their death and locations of their final resting places.
eBook