Fugitive Denim: A Moving Story of People and Pants in the Borderless World of Global Trade

by Rachel Louise Snyder

From Azerbaijan to New York City, a human-scale view of global trade. In the business of making and selling clothes, “Made in” labels do precious little to convey the constellation of treaties, countries, and people at work in the assembly of a simple pair of jeans. In Fugitive Denim journalist Rachel Louise Snyder reports from the far reaches of this multi-billion-dollar industry in search of the real people who make your clothes. From a cotton picker in Azerbaijan to a Cambodian seamstress, a denim maker in Italy to a fashion designer in New York, Snyder captures the human, environmental, and political forces at work in a dizzyingly complex and often absurd world. In a disarming and humorous voice, she ponders questions of equity, sweatshops, and corporate social responsibility through narratives of individual people, making an often academic subject accessible and compelling. Neither polemic nor prescription, Fugitive Denim captures what it means to be at work in the world in the twenty-first century.

Genres: Nonfiction, Business, Economics, Sociology, Social Justice, Politics

352 pages, Hardcover

First published December 3, 2007

About the author

Rachel Louise Snyder is the author of Fugitive Denim: A Moving Story of People and Pants in the Borderless World of Global Trade, the novel What We’ve Lost is Nothing, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us and the forthcoming memoir Women We Buried, Women We Burned (May ’23), which will be excerpted in the New Yorker in April '23. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times magazine, the Washington Post and on NPR, and she was a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow. No Visible Bruises was awarded the 2018 Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, the 2020 Book Tube Prize, the 2020 New York Public Library’s Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism and the Sidney Hillman Book Award for social justice. It won Best Book in Translation in Taiwan in 2021 and has been translated into Russian, Mandarin, Korean, Japanese, Turkish, Spanish, Hungarian, and others. It received starred reviews from Kirkus, Book Riot and Publisher’s Weekly and was named one of the best books of 2019 by the Los Angeles Times, Esquire, Amazon, Kirkus, the Library Journal, the Economist, and BookPage; the New York Times included it in their “Top Ten” books of 2019. No Visible Bruises was also a finalist for the Kirkus Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the LA Times Book Award, and the Silver Gavel Award.

Over the past two decades, Snyder has traveled to sixty countries, covering stories of human rights, gender-based violence, natural disasters, displacement and war. She lived, for six years, in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and two years in London before relocating to Washington, DC in 2009. Originally from Chicago, Snyder holds a B.A. from North Central College and an M.F.A. from Emerson College. Originally from Chicago, she has a joint appointment as a professor in journalism and literature at American University. Follow her on Twitter or Instagram: @rlswrites

Reviews

[Joanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a terrifying, complicated, beautiful world we live in. Packed with information, this book made me feel both lucky and guilty about being an American. It made me wonder if I can spend $260.00 on a pair of Edun jeans. It made me wonder if I really ought to own so many T-shirts. So many books, so many DVD's, so many THINGS. In Fugitive Denim, we follow the complex chain of people, companies, and resources that produce jeans, much the way Flower Confidential showed us all about the flower markets. A lot of people, working very hard. A lot of chemicals. A lot of shipping. And in the end, if we're lucky, a marvelous pair of jeans we can wear for years.

[Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Can you guess how many pounds of chemicals are in your jeans? Do you know why you should never wear an unwashed pair of brand new underwear? Is organic cotton really sustainable? Have you ever wondered where the crap you buy from Wal-mart really comes from? What are some of the consequences of our rabid consumerism and why should we care? The answers to these mysteries and many more are revealed in this thrilling tale of intrigue in the globalized trail of denim production!

[WORN Fashion Journal]

Rachel Louise Snyder’s Fugitive Denim comes with the tagline, “a moving story of people and pants in the borderless world of global trade” — and that’s exactly what it is. Having had no previous introduction to the ins and outs of things like global textile laws or the mechanics of a cotton gin, I was prepared for a book full of hard-to-follow facts and, although determined to learn, feared I might be in over my head. But Snyder (an author, journalist, and professor from Washington D.C.) takes this intimidating subject matter and makes it not just interesting, but relatable. Throughout the book, she shares the stories of people in five different countries: from cotton pickers in Azerbaijan to fashion designers in the United States, bridging our mental distance between the clothes on our bodies and where — and who — they come from.

Fugitive Denim begins by explaining the termination of the World Trade Organization’s Multi-Fibre Agreement (MFA) in 2005 — an agreement that, in simplest terms, “set limits on the amount of textiles and apparel any one country could export to the United States." According to Snyder, limiting exports to the United States meant that no single developing country could have a monopoly on the developed world’s market, giving many small nations (such as Cambodia, Laos, Peru, Nepal) a way of entering a market in which they otherwise might not have been able to compete. With the termination of the MFA, competition would increase and clothing prices would drop. Developing countries previously given access to large consumer markets would now have to compete against manufacturing giants like China and India without help. It’s the uncertainty and upheaval set into motion by dissolving these laws that Snyder addresses in Fugitive Denim. She puts names and stories to the people whose livelihoods are affected by the global textile industry and in doing so, makes readers aware of exactly what exists within every fibre of their pants.

There were moments where Snyder’s story felt disjointed. While the book is organized into four major parts, they have no title to indicate the section’s overlying theme, and the chapters have titles such as, “The Little Volcanoes we Carry,” and “The Ghosts in the Trees,” which are interesting and poetic, but give the reader little indication of what they’re getting into. In a book that attempts to address such a far-reaching and complicated topic, a little structural guidance would have gone a long way.

Most interesting to me was the writing itself. I expected a book about the intricacies of textile laws and their effects around the world to read more like a textbook than a good novel — but it doesn’t. Snyder presents facts with creativity, offering information to the reader through stories about people. One that stands out in my mind is a garment worker and former union leader in Cambodia who notes, after recounting being attacked on her way to protest for holiday pay, “We all die; I wasn’t afraid of dying. In living we lose control.” Along with effectively telling the story of globalized fashion, Fugitive Denim is full of these kinds of small and stirring observations, making it, truly, a moving story of people and pants.


(Review by Hailey Siracky)

[Modern Girl · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm really glad I read this book, but it really needs a bit of a tune up. The tone and style changed so drastically from chapter to chapter, and no clear thesis was ever actually presented. First you are in an exciting fair-trade, organic, denim designer's lair, then you're talking with Italians on lengthy tangents, next you're in the cotton fields, then you're finding out how they flame-proof jeans, then you go to Cambodia and stay for a long long time, then you're briefly in China and back again in New York. I'm glad all of it was in there, but I think it was in the wrong format. I think if the author had have kept these distinctly different "chunks" separate and had published this as "Five short stories about the denim industry" that would have been MUCH better. It would have allowed for such a change in tone and direction. Instead, each chapter came a new surprise. I thought it would all get tidied back together at the end. With the return to New York and the mentioning of all the informants again that helped. But again, if these distinct parts can not be pulled together for one story, they shouldn't have been. Some of that parts were great and exciting. Some were so terribly dry I did my very best to get through them. I'd read 60 well written pages within a day, and then take the next month to get through the next chapter. It definitely shows that the author can change her style, but I'm not sure if that's a compliment.

[B. Rule · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are some decent human-interest stories in this book, but at no point did I feel like I was getting a holistic grasp on the global garment industry, or even the barest outline of it. Snyder hops around and talks to lots of disparate links in the supply chain, but she never shows how they connect, nor all the other missing links in between them. I found it to be quite frustrating as a reading experience. Further, I ended up with little faith that Snyder would ask penetrating questions of her interviewees; I mostly got the impression she wanted to be their friend. So her subjects seem interesting on a personal level, but never really offer any illumination on how this great global beast is affecting them. I also found the authorial voice quite wan, and Snyder's jokes quite weak. She needed more pop in her style if she isn't going to provide the substantive goods. A fascinating topic but sadly not an account worthy of it.

[Doug Diegert · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book lacked focus. It amounted to the author getting set up to interview people in the clothing industry, and then typing up her notes. I plowed through it to extract whatever I could about global clothing trade, but I had to read a whole bunch of random words to get it. Here's a message to the publisher: I expect you to proofread and edit a book before you publish it. Example: p262 (paperback) "SA 8000 has certified factories in fifty-five countries and fifty-eight industries, the majority for apparel and textiles. Italy leads, with nearly four hundred certifications, followed by India, with 141. China is third, with 129." In the very next paragraph: "There are only about a hundred and thirty factories with SA 8000 certification in China." Why should I be interested in your book, if you aren't even interested enough to read the manuscript? Message to author: every random detail of each of your trips and conversations is not interesting to me. I'm interested in the subject of the global clothing trade, not you.

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. The author approached the subjects of textile manufacturing and global trade from a surprising perspective. I expected a typical liberal guilt fest about consumer goods (to which I'm usually pretty guilty feeling already), but instead she presented a truly balanced assessment of the situation. She gave credit to the garment industry when credit was due, while also covering the downsides to overconsumption and cheap labor. The least you'll get out of this book is a primer on global trade!

[Darryl Knudsen]

Reviewed in Women's Wear Daily 2007: Focus on people in the production chain from cotton to shelf. labor rights and environment plus denim as symbol of rebelliousness and counterculture. According to review, Gap Inc. let Snyder accompany Vendor Compliance officers and apparently gets some credit for this.

[Stephanie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have to say, I was more excited about this book before I started reading it. I was excited about the political geographies coupled with, my favorite, fashion, but it did not meet my expectations. It is good at times and bad at times. Not my favorite! My husband called it the most boring book ever.

[Gage Evans]

Have not read it yet, but it sounds like it might be a good companion to two other books I have read and highly recommend: The travels of a t-shirt in the global economy : an economist examines the markets, power and politics of world trade by Pietra Rivoli and Jeans : a cultural history of an American icon by James Sullivan.

[Lindsay · Rating 1 out of 5]

I made it halfway through before giving up. Tedious, and the author tries way too hard to be funny and quirky. Plus I kept finding typos, and unless it's a really good book, I have a hard time getting past that.

[Yvonne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting book telling of the denim/jeans supply chain - from cotton growing, harvesting, selling to the designer's process. If I wasn't in the retail industry, it might not have been as interesting.

[Jess]

A recent article by this woman was not encouraging (she did not talk about worker organizing at all as a way to improve standards, but just focused on corporate efforts and Better Work) but of course I still feel like I should read the book.

[Courtney · Rating 3 out of 5]

A found this book very educational, but I found the plot line slightly disjointed. It was definitely interesting to learn more about denim from the fields to the consumer, all the complexity and skill required.

[Jenny · Rating 1 out of 5]

couldn't even finish it

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lift up the rock that covers the denim business and see the ugly squirmy things that are underneath it. And some beautiful things too.

[Annette]

it is now in my possession!

[Cole]

Excellent book.It goes into detail how we live in a complicated world.

[Blastblast-i-no · Rating 4 out of 5]

it's very awesome you can know the whole story of denim from the oldest & very "expensive" denim

[Aramis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed getting the background on jeans and delving into the personal lives of the people involved made it resonate for me.