Fugitive Denim: A Moving Story of People and Pants in the Borderless World of Global Trade
Search in google:
“A fascinating chronicle of the $55-billion-a-year global denim industry.” —David Futrelle, Los Angeles Times The Barnes & Noble Review "Most garments carry labels with a single country but handprints from a multitude of nations," writes Rachel Louise Snyder. For her first book, the journalist traveled to a bunch of these nations to unravel the convoluted forces at work behind the production of a pair of jeans. Fugitive Denim -- which carries the arch but accurate subtitle A Moving Story of People and Pants in the Borderless World of Global Trade -- introduces readers to a cotton inspector in Azerbaijan, the struggling former Soviet republic that grows the crop but must send it elsewhere to be spun into thread; a denim designer in Italy, who worries about the relocation of his country s manufacturing sector to Asia; a factory auditor in China, employed by the Gap to monitor overseas working conditions; and, most movingly, two female garment workers in Cambodia, a country that was offered a bigger piece of the U.S. textile market in exchange for working to eradicate sweatshops. Snyder is an amiable tour guide, elucidating the often dizzying contradictions of globalization with wry humor and compassion. And she manages to strike a hopeful tone (the book includes an admiring profile of Edun, the high-end and socially conscious fashion line backed by Bono), almost in spite of her stark portrayal of the environmental and human losses behind each pair of jeans. --Barbara Spindel
Part 1The Subversive Ecosystem 13The Vegetable Lamb Conquers the World 30White Gold and All-Tex Quickie 46The Little Volcanoes We Carry 54These Galoshes Were Made for Walking 70The Particular Dream of Cheesecake Ends 81Part 2God's Nectar and Other Denim You Don't Know You Wear 93Urinating on Your Jeans Just Makes Good Sense 125How the West Was Won 138A Society of the Mind and Other Atmospheric Contaminants 145The Artisan of Unbearable Shopping 156Part 3In the Living We Lose Control 167The Ghosts in the Trees 180The Long Arm of the Non-Law 209Three Men and a Foreign Policy 223A Village with No Daughters 241Part 4Knock, Knock, Knockin' on Factory Doors 251A View of One's Own Fatigued Auditor 270The Third Party, Exhibit A: The Two-second Handshake 282The Third Party, Exhibit B: The Last-Minute Orgy and Other Shoppers' Delights 289The Guardians of Edun 294Epilogue 312Acknowledgments 321Notes 325Index 335
