At first glance, this book looks as if it might be about the business of fashion. The front cover features a model on a catwalk, and fashion is specifically mentioned in the subtitle. Both authors have a track record in the fashion-related area of textile production and their research trajectories have long since intersected. Rofel's 1999 ethnographic study of silk workers in Hangzhou is cited in Yanagisako's 2002 ethnographic study of family firms in the silk industry in Como.1 Yet just as neither of these earlier books are precisely about silk, so the present one is not precisely about fashion. The authors' declared problematic is transnational capitalism.
The research partnership behind the book is itself reasonably complex: the lead authors, with their different area of expertise, are joined by Italian scholar Simona Segre Reinach, the acknowledged expert on Sino-Italian fashion engagements. Reinach appears to have facilitated as well as...
