Currently
Referencing.

Found between two untranslated Japanese volumes on industrial sewing, in a bookshop that did not stock anything you could describe as fashion. The English edition came later. The understanding of why certain garments hold their shape while others collapse in the same fabric, the same weight, the same hands, came with it. We have been trying to reverse-engineer that answer for years. Nakamichi had already written it down.

Read this the week we bought a leather good from a name we respected and found out, three months later, it had been made in the same facility as a brand we did not. Dana Thomas spent three years tracking that answer across four continents. The book is not polemic. It is forensic. Which is worse, in the best possible way.

Bought this because we were tired of fashion photography that looked like it had been art-directed by an algorithm. Schuman points a camera at men who got dressed without thinking about being photographed. That is rarer than it should be. The book does not explain style. It just shows it, repeatedly, until you understand what you have been missing.

Picked this up the week fast fashion finally broke us. Not a polemic. An audit. Cline follows the supply chain of a fourteen-dollar dress from a factory in Bangladesh to a landfill in Iowa. The number of hands it passes through, none of them profiting significantly from the transaction, is the argument. She does not need to make a moral case. The numbers do it for her.