Exploring the intersection of Asian fashion and Western culture, the book highlights influential designers like Ritu and Catherine Walker alongside grassroots fashion from small shops and home businesses. It delves into how Asian dress has evolved into a symbol of cultural significance, challenging stereotypes of Asian women and redefining contemporary cultural and economic boundaries. Through this lens, the narrative reveals the dynamic interplay between global markets and local trends, showcasing the vibrant diversity of Asian fashion.
We live in times of extreme change. There could be no better time than now to interrogate the lives of new kinds of people, movers and makers, who navigate fragility and uncertainty to create with daring, often against great odds. Parminder Bhachu uses their dramatic life stories to uncover what makes for creativity and resilience in times of disequilibrium. What can be learnt from their creative moxie as innovators outside establishment powers? Why has their creative reach grown exponentially in our globally connected twenty-first century? How have their abilities to innovate been catalyzed without subscription to knowledge hierarchies and monopolies? These culturally dexterous movers who possess movement capital, advanced with every migration, have translated ancient maker and craft skills into transforming modern technology, science, design, architecture, and the arts. Generous, inclusive, and deeply collaborative, they are at the heart of open source sharing for collective intelligence, the common good, and the maker movement. They invigorate the economies they reside in greatly enhancing creative capacities and reach. Bhachu, herself a multiple-migrant maker, offers us a model for a hopeful way forward, bringing her unique ethnographic insights to illuminate what can be learnt about thriving in worlds of flux.
