Threads of globalization is an interdisciplinary volume that brings fashion-specific garments, motifs, materials, and methods of production into dialogue with gender and identity in various cultures throughout Asia during the long twentieth century. It examines how the shift from artisanal production to 'fast fashion' over the past 150 years has devalued women's textile labour and how skilled textile/ garment makers and the organizations that support them are preserving and reviving heritage traditions. It also offers examples of how socially engaged artists in Asia and the diaspora use their work to criticize labour and environmental abuses in the global fashion industry.

Introduction: stitching together gender, textile and garment labor, and heritage in Asia - Melia Belli Bose
Part I: Fashioning identity: textiles, garments, and belonging
1 Wearing a gendered tree: a new style of garments from early modern to twentieth-century China - Yuhang Li
2 Women for cotton and men for wool: consuming gendered textiles in colonized Korea - Kyunghee Pyun
3 Gendered blue: women's jeans in postwar Taiwan - Ying-chen Peng
4 Bhutanese women and the performance of globalization - Emma Dick
5 Weaving and dyeing the ideal of reproduction among Shidong Miao in Guizhou province - Ho Zhao-hua
Part II: Gendering creative agency: women fashion designers, textile makers, and entrepreneurs
6 Soft power: Guo Pei and the fashioning of matriarchy - Kristen Loring Brennan
7 Investigating female entrepreneurship in silk weaving in contemporary Cambodia - Magali An Berthon
8 (Re)crafting distribution networks for contemporary Philippine textiles: women's advocacy and social enterprise - B. Lynne Milgram
9 Women weaving silken identities and revitalizing various Japanese textile traditions - Millie Creighton
Part III: Creative voices for change: textiles, gender, and artivism
10 Entangled histories of craft and conflict: the story of phulkari textiles in The Singh Twins's Slaves of Fashion - Cristin McKnight Sethi
11 The politics of wastefulness and 'the poetics of waste': Ruby Chishti's sartorial interventions - Saleema Waraich
12 Made in Rana Plaza: Dilara Begum Jolly's garment factory-themed art - Melia Belli Bose
Index