Fashion studies is a burgeoning field that often highlights the contributions of genius designers and high-profile brands with little reference to what goes on behind the scenes in the supply chain. This book pulls back the curtain on the global fashion system of the past 200 years to examine the relationship between the textile mills of Yorkshire – the firms that provided the entire Western world with warm wool fabrics – and their customers. It is a microhistory of a single firm, Abraham Moon and Sons Ltd, that sheds light on important macro questions about British industry, government policies on international trade, the role of multi-generational family firms and the place of design and innovation in business strategy. It is the first book to connect Yorkshire tweeds to the fashion system. Written in lively, accessible prose, this book will appeal to anyone who works in fashion or who wears fashion. There is nothing like it – and it will raise the bar for historical studies of global fashion. Here you’ll find intriguing stories about a tweed theft from the Leeds Coloured Cloth Hall, debates on tariffs and global trade, the battle against synthetic fibres and the reinvention of British tweeds around heritage marketing. You won’t be bored.

Robbers have always seen themselves as the cream of the underworld, at the top of the criminal aristocracy, both in and out of prison. Gangland Robbers follows the stories of the men and women who go to great lengths to organise heists which, if all goes well, will keep them in luxury for many years, if not for life. If their plans fail, then often it is another sort of life. Bestselling Gangland authors Morton and Lobez cover the best stories of the past 200 years: from the tunnel-digging burglary of the Bank of Australia in 1828 through to the hold-ups of the bushrangers; Squizzy Taylor and his crew; the train robbers of the 1930s; Jockey Smith; ‘Mad Dog’ Cox; the ill-fated Victorian Bookie Robbery, as well as the less well-known ‘Angel of Death’, ‘The Pushbike Bandit’ and ‘The Gentleman Bandit’. Gangland Robbers explores the lives—their own and others—that these bandits ruined, those who went to the gallows, and the very few who redeemed themselves.