The rise of British colonialism in South Asia was intimately tied to the British desire for cotton, which eventually led the British to manufacture cotton quickly and cheaply ‘at home’ while crippling local cotton industries in South Asia.  In recent decades, the drive to capitalize on consumer desire for clothing has reached crisis levels, with fast – or ‘throwaway’ – fashion destructively changing the relationship between people and the clothes they wear, and wreaking havoc on the environment by affecting climate change and creating mountains of waste. This chapter focuses on Ruby Chishti, an artist trained in sculpture at the National College of Arts in Lahore and now residing in New York. Chishti’s relationship with fabric over time is examined as a path for reiing clothing’s possibilities and potential, while stressing the costs – environmental, human, personal – of clothes that are designed to be quickly thrown away. Chishti’s early engagements with clothing sought to maintain connections to absent family members; after relocating to a new country and losing her family home in Pakistan, she attempted to construct a new ‘home’ untethered from a physical location. Her later monumental installations connect to the forced migrations of refugees and larger geopolitical and environmental crises. Her choice of practice and material engages with a series of issues plaguing society, including those related to fast fashion. In particular, Chishti’s more recent works with discarded clothing transform cheap, ephemeral waste into sculptural/architectural monuments, thereby resisting the abbreviated (by design) lifespan of fast fashion and reflecting upon its ramifications.

Using advertising campaigns in popular magazines in the early twentieth century, this chapter analyzes gendered consumption of textiles in colonized Korea. The Japanese Government-General allowed the manufacture of cotton textiles or cotton-mixed synthetic textiles by colonized citizens in Korea. In the advertisements of Kyungbang and Jobang, two representative ethno-national companies of cotton woven textiles owned and operated by Korean people, women were often portrayed as major consumers and patrons of commodities provided by these companies. Woollen textiles were not allowed to be manufactured within Korea until 1945. Japanese companies or Japanese-owned wholesalers monopolized the supply of woollen textiles and advertised them as a luxury for the elite – affluent men and dandies. The business history of Kyungbang and Jobang is introduced in the context of ‘patriotic capitalism,’ or construction of national capital (minjok jabon). The dichotomy between cotton woven textiles and woollen woven textiles is also visible in public space and resulted from economic disparity between rural and urban communities. At the beginning of the colonized governance of Korean citizens, the Japanese government used a pretext of public hygiene and sumptuous consumption to eradicate community-based funerary customs while they promoted homegrown production of ramie or hemp linen by women for funerary clothing in rural areas.

This chapter presents a cultural history of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century building tradesman in Britain, Ireland and North America, focusing on his social identity and professional class; the textual and visual representations of the building trades in contemporary print culture; degrees of social and professional mobility; and the means by which the builder promoted and self-fashioned as an arbiter of architectural taste. Of particular importance here is how the reputations of tradesman were characterized in social and architectural discourse at a time when concerns were raised about the quality of speculatively built urban domestic architecture (in terms of aesthetics and sound construction), a discourse predicated on the emerging architectural profession and its corresponding demand for authority over all aspects of design and building. Taken together, the themes of this chapter provide the cultural backdrop for an examination of the artisan’s relationship to house design, to interior decoration and to real estate advertising.

Until the 1960s in Cambodia, silk weaving was an ancestral textile practice structured as a cottage industry almost exclusively run by women in rural areas and destined for domestic consumption. With the civil war in 1970 and the establishment of the Khmer Rouge regime in 1975, local silk production nearly vanished. Since the country’s pacification process and general elections in 1993, the silk sector has reopened to foreign investments, reshaped under the leadership of local NGOs and foreign-owned craft companies. This chapter examines the history of Cambodian initiatives owned by women in the post-conflict era. It explores a range of entrepreneurial projects, from the pioneering feminist NGO Khemara to Silk Associations of Cambodia, which, despite its name, is a family business led by Chin Koeur, a weaver turned entrepreneur, and the social enterprise Color Silk, a silk craft model positioned between foreign sponsors and site-specific community development. Through the study of the company owners’ history, their geographic locations, typologies of handcrafted goods, and their discourses, the Cambodian silk sector is treated as a hub made up of policy makers, organizations, and materials, in which female craft entrepreneurs negotiate with issues of leadership, empowerment, and dependence on international donors and clientele. Despite efforts towards social welfare and education, female weavers remain simultaneously the main beneficiaries and workforce of these silk initiatives, with limited opportunities to gain more autonomy and agency within the sector.

Based on participant-observation research, Japanese women’s involvement in residential silk-weaving workshops in a remote area of the Japanese alps in Nagano prefecture is presented. Through these seminars, women return to a form of work as leisure that was often tedious to former generations of women required to do this for family finances, and hazardous to the health of women working in textile factories. Using the expectation that women act as curators and perpetuators of Japanese cultural tradition allows their engagement in these seminars away from their usual domestic and work duties. While redisiing sericulture and silk weaving, they enact a Japanese cultural identity globally associated with a silk-weaving heritage, and their own relational identities with others. They also find a culturally valued cloaking mechanism for their engagement in pursuits in search of their own selves and self-enhancement outside of their family obligations, while creating beautiful silk textiles. The chapter also compares this with women involved in wool crafting in Hokkaido seminars which play on Western associations but also fulfill regional associations of Hokkaido, and with indigo dyeing of textiles in Shikoku, to show how regional identities and associations with textiles from different areas of Japan fit into an overall construction of Japanese national identities.

When the Chinese designer, Guo Pei (b. 1967­), catapulted into the world of Parisian haute couture, critics embraced her embellished styles and grand scale of production – a match of materials and labor that seemed possible only in China. They pondered her bold leap over the austerity of the Mao years to the iconography of imperial China. Such romanticism reinvigorated discourses of Orientalism, a cause further amplified by celebrity clients and museum exhibitions. However, the project of disentangling her work from its audiences has obscured a broader issue: Guo Pei’s pivotal role as a woman designing global fashion. This chapter explores Guo Pei’s fascination with two muses, the Qing dynasty Empress Dowager Cixi (1835­–1908) and the contemporary American model, Carmen Dell’Orefice (b. 1931), as an alternative to the femme fatale presented in fashion from the nineteenth century through the present. Rather than portraying the woman as a sexualized commodity or cunning consumer, Guo Pei’s designs visualize power as an amassing of resources and relationships. Coupled with theatrical imagery, her works invert the ephemeral world of fashion’s femme fatale and challenge notions of age and tradition as antiquated. By leveraging dignity and dominance through soft power, Guo Pei offers an image of a woman of means – a matriarch who defines history.

Borrowing its title from the notorious seventeenth-century speculative builder Nicholas Barbon’s seminal work on free market economics, published in 1685, the introduction offers a new apology for a much-maligned member of the architectural community: the building artisan. Taking the form of a discursive chapter in its own right, it weaves together a critical literature review with an extended analysis of the artisan’s place within architectural, design and cultural histories. Topics include the adverse effect of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century criticisms of the building community on modern scholarship; distinctions between intellectual and manual labour in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; and the systemic problems arising from a new literature devoted to British Atlantic world studies.

In the late Qing Empire of China (1856–1911), a novel design appeared on robes. Unlike the conventional design of using flowers and plants as a repetitive pattern, in this new style, the shape of a costume was treated as a canvas and a complete single tree or a cluster of assorted plants was arranged on both sides of a full-length garment. The anatomical body of the wearer beneath the attire and the vegetation on the clothing coincided. This new design was widely reproduced through woven and embroidered textiles and was used for both male and female outfits. Accordingly, the image of the plants was also prescribed with a masculine or a feminine attribute. Scholars have addressed the long-established tradition of anthropomorphizing plants in Chinese paintings and decorative arts from social, political and cultural perspectives. However, the allegorical meaning of the embodiment of painting-like vegetation on garments has not been studied. This chapter traces the historical development of this style and then discusses how such a new design intertwined with different notions of body and nature as China transitioned from empire to nation state. In particular, it shows how textiles enabled such a new relationship between body and nature.

This chapter builds on a rich and complex history of the eighteenth-century urban house in the cities of Britain, Ireland and North America. Shifting emphasis away from construction, economic competence and labour organization – the predominant focus of academic studies devoted to this class of building producer – it investigates the artisan’s engagement with the processes and aesthetics of architectural design. With prominence given to the design of the house façade, topics include the emerging standardization in building construction; building regulations and the varying degrees of control exercised by landowners and city councils; and the responsibility of design to the urban milieu, specifically the requisite (ideal) interface between private concern (house) and public obligation (street). With reference to artisanal education through apprenticeship and builders’ academies, and the role of pattern books and drawing portfolios, this chapter argues that building tradesmen were concerned as much with making design (architecture) as with making profits (building).

This introduction presents the problematic of the avant garde in relation to postmodern culture and post-politics, both of which are premised on the notion that Marxist class struggle is outmoded in an age after the end of ideology. The prospects for a new theory of the avant garde, related to the existing practices of contemporary socially engaged art, are defined in terms of class analysis and psychoanalysis, with an emphasis on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Peter Bürger, Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. Avant-garde art is then related to revolutionary and communist politics. A closing section summarises the contents of the book.

The structural action of vaults depends on their final shape rather than on their method of construction. Intersecting semicircular barrel vaults evolved into pointed Gothic vaults which remain stable but need much less material. The vaults between the groins can be slightly domed, so they can be analysed much like fuller domes, by both membrane and slicing techniques. The ribs at the groins carry severe stresses; this is their structural purpose. The lines of thrust escape from the ribs into vaulting pockets filled with rubble, whence they pass through the walls into the buttresses. Ungewitter’s tables show how thrusts vary with vault materials and rise-to-span ratios. Vaults develop cracks of different types (as do arches); these can respond differently to unexpected loads, such as those due to fires and firefighting. Technical analyses of vaults can illuminate historical debates, about the original presence and purpose of flying buttresses, for example. Fan vaults are more demanding technically than other vaults but can still be analysed using membrane techniques to obtain profiles and lines of thrust. Henry VII Chapel at Westminster provides a case study of cracks.

The British industrial music group Test Dept. was involved in the 1980s in labour struggles against neoconservativism. From the Miners’ Strike, to the Poll Tax strike and the Polish Solidarity movement, Test Dept developed an original approach to music performance and materials based on the Stakhanovite model of the industrial worker. The eclipse of industrial work at the moment of the group’s emergence allows us to ask relevant questions about contemporary social practice art in the context of contemporary post-Fordism. Today’s state of precarity and shift from class politics to nomadic anarchism bring into view some of the effects of the postmodern theory of the 1980s that were otherwise occluded in Test Dept’s Bolshevik classicism.