100 books like Slave to Fashion

This is an award winning book by an extraordinary social commentator who turned his anthropological eye to the Bangladeshi garment industry in the aftermath of Rana Plaza – the 2012 factory collapse that killed 1,138 people. This is painstaking and sensitive work documenting the lives of workers and the poverty and instability that drives people into garment factories. It is also a detailed explanation of how Rana Plaza was the latest in a long list of industrial homicides that stretches back to imperialism and the East India Company. It is exceptional.

This is such an inspirational book from the heart of the anti-globalisation movement in 2001. It documents the lives of immigrant women working in underground sweatshops not just in the USA but right across the world. It resolutely stands as a monument against the ‘down trodden’ woman stereotype and welcomes you into an often ignored world where workers are fighting back against some of the biggest corporations on the planet.

This is an anthology of work about the Bangladeshi garment industry in the months and years following the Rana Plaza factory collapse that killed 1,138 people. It is rigorous academic work that doesn’t shy away from asking hard questions, and which seeks to tackle the gigantic problem of how to end exploitation in the garment industry.

A classic book on the pain that fashion inflicts on both people and planet. This book does an excellent job of showing how the exploitation of people is inseparable from the exploitation of the biosphere. It is a searing critique of the fashion industry and its voracious appetite for evermore profit, and how this short-termist model is driving us towards disaster.

I loved this no-nonsense take on consumer culture. Listen, I love to shop. I love an outfit. But Aja Barber’s writing was a necessary wake-up call when it came to my spending habits—what’s driving them and how they are impacting the planet.

It’s easy to think the world’s environmental and social issues driven by consumerism can’t be fixed with individual choice, so why bother changing? While that’s true on some level, I feel spiritually (and financially) lighter when I am buying less and caring better for what I already own.

This book helped me finally break some shopping habits I wasn’t proud of and gave me a framework to continue questioning which of my habits are driven by our consumer culture rather than my own genuine desires. 

Fashion is, without any question, a matter of one's own taste. Or so one would think. But no other successful fashion designer has ever analysed and observed the New York fashion world of the 1950s to mid-60s as mercilessly and literarily as John Weitz did in his novel published in 1970. With his clearly English-influenced men’s designs he kept his distance from New York’s high society. Perhaps this was due to his unusual life path.

John Weitz, born to a famous Berlin Jewish family. To guarantee his education, in 1936 his parents send him to London. After his A-levels, John and a short apprenticeship emigrated to the US and worked after 1944 for the OSS (now the CIA) during the Second World War as an under-cover agent in German-occupied France and witnessed the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp Dachau.

Weitz's reputation as a men's fashion designer had the name… show more.

The very name “Zanzibar” has a sort of magic to it—and I certainly fell under its spell when I read M.M. Kaye’s book for what would be the first of many, many times back in the 80s.

I had never heard of Zanzibar; I knew nothing of the ruling family, the Sayyids of Muscat and Oman, but by the time I was a hundred pages into M.M. Kaye’s epic story of an American woman who plunges into intrigues she thinks she understands but doesn’t, I felt I knew them all intimately. This book is a coming-of-age story, a brilliant evocation of place, and so much more.

I was on the Guggenheim committee that awarded The Reaper’s Garden the prize for the best book on the eighteenth century in 2010.

The eighteenth century marked the climax of the slave trade and the plantation system in European colonies in the Americas and elsewhere. Brown’s book brings the plantation world of eighteenth-century Jamaica alive like no other that I have read.

This was a world filled with death, not only the mortality of the African slaves but just as commonly of the white plantation owners and their families who seldom lasted two years before dying of tropical diseases. Funerals became competing sites for display between blacks and whites.

The funerals of black people became such powerful vehicles of protest and cultural identity that the plantation owners tried to repress them. Brown’s book stands out in my mind as a powerful study of the evils of slavery and morbid culture… show more.

Although broaching many more themes than slavery, this book gives us a unique insight into how local patterns of enslavement linked up with the growing colonial presence of the Dutch and Portuguese in Timor (East Indonesia). The book has been thoroughly researched by the world’s most knowledgeable scholar on this subject. For me, it is a source of inspiration for how local forms of enslavement can be studied in interaction with European colonial expansion.  

Laura Murphy uses nearly forty survivor narratives from around the world to demonstrate that slavery is not a heinous phenomenon of the past, but of the present as well. Her work is essential to students of American history; it ensures that slavery is never presented as merely a crime of the past or only as a despicable practice isolated to one geographic region.