International Women’s Day on Saturday 7 March at 2pm is being marked with a talk by Tansy Hoskins about her book Stitched Up – the Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion. Ballad singer Jennifer Reid will perform alongside the talk.
Winner of the ICA Bookshop Book of the Year 2014, Stitched Updelves into the alluring world of fashion to reveal what is behind the clothes we wear. Moving between Karl Lagerfeld and Karl Marx, the book explores consumerism, class and advertising to reveal the interests which benefit from exploitation.
Tansy dissects fashion’s vampiric relationship with the planet and with our bodies to uncover what makes it so damaging. Why does ‘size zero’ exist and what is the reality of working life for models? In a critique of the portrayal of race in fashion, the book also examines the global balance of power in the industry.
Stitched Up provides a unique critical examination of contemporary culture and the distorting priorities of capitalism. Alongside this Jennifer Reid’s songs, drawn from the Library’s vast collection of songbooks and songsheets of protest and rebellion, will form an apt commentary.
Meanwhile the first first talk in the Library’s new Invisible Histories series is on Wednesday 11 March at 2pm: From Bilbao to Manchester: the Basque child refugees of 1937 by Charles Jepson.
In June 1937 a large group of Basque refugee children arrived in Manchester. They had fled their homes in Bilbao in order to escape the daily bombardment inflicted by Franco’s fascist forces during the Spanish Civil War. They would spend the next two years living in a number of Basque Colonies in the Manchester region.
Admission free; all welcome.
Future talks in the series are as follows:
Wed 25 March ”Red Nelson”: the English working class and the making of C.L.R. James – Christian Hogsbjerg
Wed 8 April The people: the rise and fall of the working class, 1910-2010 – Selina Todd
Wed 22 April Notoriously militant: the story of a union branch at Ford Dagenham – Sheila Cohen
More information at www.wcml.org.uk/events.
