How global fashion brands failed Rana Plaza’s survivors
by Rebecca Prentice The survivors of the deadly supply chain disaster were paid ‘rights-based’ compensation from global brands; it wasn’t sufficient to help rebuild their lives The Rana…
Tag: Fashion
Consumer Culture Won’t Lead to Body Positivity
Focusing on what bodies can do shifts attention away from cultural lenses that focus on how bodies look. Holly Falconer/Getty Images I have an 8-year-old daughter. From time…
The Hard Labor That Fuels the Hair Trade
The majority of hair that India exports comes from waste—such as the strands gathered in this picture of a street collector in Chennai. Emma Tarlo Every evening, for…
Brent Luvaas on his book, Street Style
Interview by Matthew Raj Webb https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/street-style-9780857855756 Matthew Raj Webb: Not so long ago, fashion showed up in anthropologists’ writing largely as a pejorati…
Lisa Rofel and Sylvia Yanagisako on Fabricating Transnational Capitalism
Interview by Janet Connor https://www.dukeupress.edu/fabricating-transnational-capitalism Janet Conner: Why is fashion so good for thinking about capitalism? Lisa Rofel and Sylvia Yanagi…
Covid-19 in Tamil Nadu: Textile livelihoods under threat
by Geert De Neve **Reprinted by permission from the Sussex Sustainability Research Programme.** On the 24th of March 2020, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a complete national…
Joshua Bluteau on his dissertation
My temptation is to hedge my bets and confidently claim that I have two page ninety-nines. This is true in the sense that there is a literal ninety-ninth…
The Moon as Metaphor in Migration Research
Chinese migrants are influential players in the Made in Italy fashion sector. They are also perceived as unfamiliar and alien, inauthentic producers of uniquely “Italian” merchandise. I figure…
Our ‘Fashion Fast’: 6-week Reflections
**We are thrilled to have completed our 6-week, 6-item ‘fashion fast’ and have raised more than £600 for the labour rights NGO, Labour Behind the Label. If you would like…
Our ‘Fashion Fast’: Week 6
**We are thrilled to have completed our 6-week, 6-item ‘fashion fast’ and have raised more than £600 for the labour rights NGO, Labour Behind the Label. If you would like…
Our ‘Fashion Fast’: Week 5
We are nearly to the end of our 6-week ‘6 items challenge.’ As eight undergraduates and one lecturer at the University of Sussex, we have committed to living…
Our ‘Fashion Fast’: Week 3
by Alfred Lewis **Read about the first and second week of our ‘fashion fast’ here and here. If you can, please donate to our efforts to raise money for the labour rights…
Our ‘Fashion Fast’: Week 2
by Amelia Yates **Read about the first week of our ‘fashion fast’ here. If you can, please donate to our efforts to raise money for the labour rights charity Labour Behind the…
Remembering the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire
Today, the 25th of March, marks the anniversary of New York’s Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, in which 146 garment workers lost their lives. The fire occurred in 1911,…
The Story of our Fashion Fast!
by Rebecca Prentice, Hannah Amey, Maeve Devers, Rifka Fehr, Olive Howland Milne, Alfred Lewis, Phoebe Marsh, Joana Pereira and Amelia Yates As eight first-year anthropology students and one lecturer a…
Visitor Log Chronicled for the Denisovan Family Home
Tooth pendants (one pictured here), along with other artifacts discovered at Denisova Cave, mark the earliest evidence of human ornamentation—between 43,000 and 49,000 years ago—in northern Eurasia. …
Sewing Needles Reveal the Roots of Fashion
[no-caption] F. d’Errico/L. Doyon The Inya River in southwestern Siberia winds through a landscape of striking seasonal changes. In the summer, crystal clear waters lap below alpine forests.…
Bangladesh Garment Workers Strike
Thousands of garment workers who make clothes for global brands have taken strike action over low wages. It is time the Western consumer listened. More than 50,000 Bangladeshi…
The Pussyhat’s Identity Crisis
January 2019 marks the second anniversary of the Women’s March—a protest that arose in response to then U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump’s “locker room talk” and to the…
A Relationship with Fashion: Thoughts from an Anthropology Student
by Silvia Irina Berástegui I arrived in Brighton 5 years ago with the dream of finding a good job and starting an autonomous life of my own. During…
Work injury compensation still missing in Bangladesh’s labour standards
by Rebecca Prentice **Republished from The Conversation.** In the five years since the collapse of the Rana Plaza garment factory building in Bangladesh – in which more than 1,134…
Training Adorno
Is it mean to advise someone wanting to write on sneakers to go and read Adorno? On trainers/sneakers, surely Adorno would be asking what is so secretive about…
How to read a t-shirt (and the future)
Listening for the future is a tricky thing. If we listen far enough out into the future, we are dealing with very weak signals. Or, better, we are…