: “Slave to Fashion offers hope of a fairer, more ethical world and gives the reader plenty of tools to navigate a challenging fashion system.”—Livia Firth There are over 35 million people trapped in modern slavery today—the largest number of slaves in modern history. This is fueled by the global demand for cheap labor—which is what makes the fast fashion industry work. Slave to Fashion is a highly accessible book which uses brilliant design, personal stories, and easy-to-grasp infographics to raise awareness among common brand consumers. Fair trade and sustainable fashion expert Safia Minney draws on her extensive knowledge and personal experience to call attention to the human hardship that goes hand-in-hand with producing our clothes, and highlights what governments, business leaders, and consumers can do to call time on this unnecessary suffering. The product of a successful crowdfunding campaign, Slave to Fashion celebrates those fighting for justice and the many initiatives that are taking place. It contains a practical toolkit that all consumers can use to demand change from the companies that produce our clothes. Safia Minney is a pioneer in ethical business. She developed the fashion industry’s first fair trade supply chains and has helped to create social and organic standards to improve the lives of thousands of economically marginalized people in the developing world. Minney now brings her expertise and experience to help businesses embrace sustainability and transparency in their operations and branding. She is the author of several acclaimed books, including Naked Fashion and Slow Fashion.

Slaves to Fashion is a pioneering cultural history of the black dandy, from his emergence in Enlightenment England to his contemporary incarnations in the cosmopolitan art worlds of London and New York. It is populated by sartorial impresarios such as Julius Soubise, a freed slave who sometimes wore diamond-buckled, red-heeled shoes as he circulated through the social scene of eighteenth-century London, and Yinka Shonibare, a prominent Afro-British artist who not only styles himself as a fop but also creates ironic commentaries on black dandyism in his work. Interpreting performances and representations of black dandyism in particular cultural settings and literary and visual texts, Monica L. Miller emphasizes the importance of sartorial style to black identity formation in the Atlantic diaspora. Dandyism was initially imposed on black men in eighteenth-century England, as the Atlantic slave trade and an emerging culture of conspicuous consumption generated a vogue in dandified black servants. “Luxury slaves” tweaked and reworked their uniforms, and were soon known for their sartorial novelty and sometimes flamboyant personalities. Tracing the history of the black dandy forward to contemporary celebrity incarnations such as Andre 3000 and Sean Combs, Miller explains how black people became arbiters of style and how they have historically used the dandy’s signature tools—clothing, gesture, and wit—to break down limiting identity markers and propose new ways of fashioning political and social possibility in the black Atlantic world. With an aplomb worthy of her iconographic subject, she considers the black dandy in relation to nineteenth-century American literature and drama, W. E. B. Du Bois’s reflections on black masculinity and cultural nationalism, the modernist aesthetics of the Harlem Renaissance, and representations of black cosmopolitanism in contemporary visual art.

Katie Castle loses her dream job with chic fashion designer Penny Moss, as well as her fiancé, Penny's son, after a fling with one of the company drivers, and attempts to maneuver herself back into the fashion world.

A detailed, finely researched and profusely illustrated history of clothing and fashion in the Roman Empire.

In Exquisite Slaves, Tamara J. Walker examines how slaves used elegant clothing as a language for expressing attitudes about gender and status in the wealthy urban center of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Lima, Peru. Drawing on traditional historical research methods, visual studies, feminist theory, and material culture scholarship, Walker argues that clothing was an emblem of not only the reach but also the limits of slaveholders' power and racial domination. Even as it acknowledges the significant limits imposed on slaves' access to elegant clothing, Exquisite Slaves also showcases the insistence and ingenuity with which slaves dressed to convey their own sense of humanity and dignity. Building on other scholars' work on slaves' agency and subjectivity in examining how they made use of myriad legal discourses and forums, Exquisite Slaves argues for the importance of understanding the body itself as a site of claims-making.

THE FIRST PSY/CHANGELING NOVEL from the New York Times bestselling author of Shards of Hope, Shield of Winter, and Heart of Obsidian... The book that Christine Feehan called "a must-read for all of my fans." In a world that denies emotions, where the ruling Psy punish any sign of desire, Sascha Duncan must conceal the feelings that brand her as flawed. To reveal them would be to sentence herself to the horror of “rehabilitation”—the complete psychic erasure of everything she ever was…Both human and animal, Lucas Hunter is a Changeling hungry for the very sensations the Psy disdain. After centuries of uneasy coexistence, these two races are now on the verge of war over the brutal murders of several Changeling women. Lucas is determined to find the Psy killer who butchered his packmate, and Sascha is his ticket into their closely guarded society. But he soon discovers that this ice-cold Psy is very capable of passion—and that the animal in him is fascinated by her. Caught between their conflicting worlds, Lucas and Sascha must remain bound to their identities—or sacrifice everything for a taste of darkest temptation…

Naked Fashion invites you to join the movement of consumers, entrepreneurs, and creative professionals who are using their purchasing power, talents, and experience to make fashion more sustainable. Anyone with an active interest in fashion and where our clothes come from or looking for a career in fashion and the media will find inspiration and advice on how to make a difference. Designers and creatives from all over the world—including photographers, models, illustrators, actors, and journalists—talk about what they are doing differently to make fashion more sustainable: Emma Watson explains why fair trade fashion is so important to her. Summer Rayne Oakes describes how she took on the model agencies. Vivienne Westwood talks high-fashion without the high stakes for the planet. Inside you will find fair trade and environment, styling and modeling, up-cycling and "slow" fashion, how we can change the high street, an ethical brand directory, and stunning visuals throughout. Safia Minney is founder and CEO of fair trade and sustainable fashion label People Tree. She has turned a lifelong interest in environment, trade, and social justice issues into an award-winning social business. Minney is widely regarded as a leader in the fair trade movement and has been awarded Outstanding Social Entrepreneur by the World Economic Forum and an MBE for her work in fair trade and the fashion industry.

In an adventurous and extraordinary life, Equiano (c.1745-c.1797) criss-crossed the Atlantic world, from West Africa to the Caribbean to the USA to Britain, either as a slave or fighting with the Royal Navy. His account of his life is not only one of the great documents of the abolition movement, but also a startling, moving story of danger and betrayal. Great Journeys allows readers to travel both around the planet and back through the centuries – but also back into ideas and worlds frightening, ruthless and cruel in different ways from our own. Few reading experiences can begin to match that of engaging with writers who saw astounding things: Great civilisations, walls of ice, violent and implacable jungles, deserts and mountains, multitudes of birds and flowers new to science. Reading these books is to see the world afresh, to rediscover a time when many cultures were quite strange to each other, where legends and stories were treated as facts and in which so much was still to be discovered.

Sweet Nights, No Promises… After her year-long affair with Solomon Maclaine, it was clear to Roberta that she would never be anything but his mistress. Mac's first marriage had left its scars on him, but he still seemed to give most of his time to his ex-wife and spoiled daughter. Roberta faced a hard decision: if she were to have the commitment and children she craved, she'd have to leave. But could she really give up the love she shared with Mac? A love that brought with it no promises…but the sweetest nights of passion?

In the late 1630s, lured by the promise of the New World, Andrea Stuart’s earliest known maternal ancestor, George Ashby, set sail from England to settle in Barbados. He fell into the life of a sugar plantation owner by mere chance, but by the time he harvested his first crop, a revolution was fully under way: the farming of sugar cane, and the swiftly increasing demands for sugar worldwide, would not only lift George Ashby from abject poverty and shape the lives of his descendants, but it would also bind together ambitious white entrepreneurs and enslaved black workers in a strangling embrace. Stuart uses her own family story—from the seventeenth century through the present—as the pivot for this epic tale of migration, settlement, survival, slavery and the making of the Americas. As it grew, the sugar trade enriched Europe as never before, financing the Industrial Revolution and fuelling the Enlightenment. And, as well, it became the basis of many economies in South America, played an important part in the evolution of the United States as a world power and transformed the Caribbean into an archipelago of riches. But this sweet and hugely profitable trade—“white gold,” as it was known—had profoundly less palatable consequences in its precipitation of the enslavement of Africans to work the fields on the islands and, ultimately, throughout the American continents. Interspersing the tectonic shifts of colonial history with her family’s experience, Stuart explores the interconnected themes of settlement, sugar and slavery with extraordinary subtlety and sensitivity. In examining how these forces shaped her own family—its genealogy, intimate relationships, circumstances of birth, varying hues of skin—she illuminates how her family, among millions of others like it, in turn transformed the society in which they lived, and how that interchange continues to this day. Shifting between personal and global history, Stuart gives us a deepened understanding of the connections between continents, between black and white, between men and women, between the free and the enslaved. It is a story brought to life with riveting and unparalleled immediacy, a story of fundamental importance to the making of our world.