Overview

The coveted “Made in Italy” label calls to mind visions of nimble-fingered Italian tailors lovingly sewing elegant, high-end clothing. The phrase evokes a sense of authenticity, heritage, and rustic charm. Yet, as Elizabeth L. Krause uncovers in Tight Knit, Chinese migrants are the ones sewing “Made in Italy” labels into low-cost items for a thriving fast-fashion industry—all the while adding new patterns to the social fabric of Italy’s iconic industry.   Krause offers a revelatory look into how families involved in the fashion industry are coping with globalization based on longterm research in Prato, the historic hub of textile production in the heart of metropolitan Tuscany. She brings to the fore the tensions—over value, money, beauty, family, care, and belonging—that are reaching a boiling point as the country struggles to deal with the same migration pressures that are triggering backlash all over Europe and North America. Tight Knit tells a fascinating story about the heterogeneity of contemporary capitalism that will interest social scientists, immigration experts, and anyone curious about how globalization is changing the most basic of human conditions—making a living and making a life.   

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It is a truism that family never falls out of fashion; it is also a truism that fashion is quickly out of date. Tight Knit stitches these together, in a remarkable account of how global apparel supply chains intertwine with transnational families and the social and material bases of fast fashion entrepreneurship in Italy and Chinese immigrant labor. With implications for the rapid shifts in labor taking place not just in the fashion industry but more broadly, Tight Knit illuminates the mutual implication of family relationships and the complex fabric of the global economy. --Bill Maurer, coeditor of Paid: Tales of Dongles, Checks, and Other Money Stuff In this gut-wrenching ethnography of the Made in Italy label, Krause travels along the underground routes of the global fashion industry, where not only garments circulate, but also Chinese migrant laborers, their families, and their children, whose precarious claims to Italian citizenship expose the crisis of belonging in the New Europe. Tight Knit is what an anthropology of global capital ought to look like. --Lilith Mahmud, author of The Brotherhood of Freemason Sisters: Gender, Secrecy, and Fraternity in It

It is a truism that family never falls out of fashion; it is also a truism that fashion is quickly out of date. Tight Knit stitches these together, in a remarkable account of how global apparel supply chains intertwine with transnational families and the social and material bases of fast fashion entrepreneurship in Italy and Chinese immigrant labor. With implications for the rapid shifts in labor taking place not just in the fashion industry but more broadly, Tight Knit illuminates the mutual implication of family relationships and the complex fabric of the global economy. -- Bill Maurer, coeditor of Paid: Tales of Dongles, Checks, and Other Money Stuff In this gut-wrenching ethnography of the Made in Italy label, Krause travels along the underground routes of the global fashion industry, where not only garments circulate, but also Chinese migrant laborers, their families, and their children, whose precarious claims to Italian citizenship expose the crisis of belonging in the New Europe. Tight Knit is what an anthropology of global capital ought to look like. -- Lilith Mahmud, author of The Brotherhood of Freemason Sisters: Gender, Secrecy, and Fraternity in It Chinese economic migrants occupy a niche in global fast fashion markets. In narrating the development of the fast fashion industry in Prato that developed during Italy's industrial boom and its transformation from being run by small Italian family firms to being run by Chinese migrants, Krause's Tight Knit elucidates on the social life of Chinese fast fashion operators in Prato and their process of becoming global. --Adua Elizabeth Paciocco International Migration Review (6/1/2020 12:00:00 AM)

Author Information

Elizabeth L. Krause is professor of anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

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