Fashionability: Abraham Moon and the Creation of British Cloth for the Global Market

摘要

This book is indicative of a new era in fashion history. The need to justify the discipline's critical credentials is no longer necessary, but this addition to the canon offers an exciting, fresh perspective on its praxis. At its foundation are the advances of the last thirty years that sought to overcome schismatic approaches to fashion design, marketing, textiles or economic histories. However, Fashionability gives a contemporary edge and concrete form to the need for multi-disciplinarity. The author, Regina Lee Blaszczyk, explores an intricate web of connections within and between the people, companies, organizations and institutions of the British woolen industry and an international fashion system. Set against the massive social and technological changes of the last 200 years, she offers a compelling narrative that plots a history of makers, mills, machinery, yarns, fibres, dyes and garments and the fashion intermediaries who design, forecast, style, merchandise, distribute and retail British cloth in a global marketplace. This is a history told through the story of one Yorkshire cloth manufacturer, the family firm of Abraham Moon and Sons Ltd. As Blaszczyk points out, 'narrative is about storytelling' (p. 3) and in charting the early years of the company, there is something reminiscent of Arnold Bennett's Five Towns novels. Like Bennett, the vicissitudes of trade amidst growing competition from Europe and North America, the cult of entrepreneurship, growing specialization and rivalry within and between towns often just a few miles apart are seen through the lens of individual aspiration, ambition and the ties of family and community transposed from the Potteries to the cloth-making districts of West Yorkshire.