The Working Class Movement Library will celebrate International Women’s Day on Saturday 7 March at 2pm 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 Up delves 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.

This event is part of Wonder Women: Radical Manchester. It is free, and open to all.

Wonder women is inspired by a shock moment in April 1913 when three ordinary Edwardian women surprised guards at Manchester Art Gallery, smashing glass and causing a commotion in the fight for universal suffrage.

With events, debate, music, art and more, Wonder Women is a five-year project that asks how far we’ve come, and how far we have yet to go. The 2015 programme marks the third year of the journey

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