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Art historians have studied the art of high fashion clothing, but with the well-known exceptions of Degas’ paintings and drawings of milliners, seamstresses, and the New Orleans cotton trade, and Lewis Hine’s depictions of child labor in American cotton mills, they have seldom considered the work of artists who have addressed the history and contemporary reality of textile and clothing manufacture. This is a striking omission. In his magisterial study, Empire of Cotton (2014), Sven Beckert argues that cotton has been central in “the making and remaking of global capitalism, and with it of the modern world.” One could make similar if less all-embracing arguments when it comes to the history of linen, wool, silk, and synthetic fibers.

We seek papers that deal with representations in any medium of the work and workers associated with textile and clothing manufacture. Possible subjects include, but are not limited to, the Lawrence Textile Strike (1912) (associated with the slogan “Bread and Roses”), The Paterson Silk Strike and strikers’ Pageant (1913), the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire (1911), the Tazreen Factory Fire in Dhaka (2012), Philip Evergood’s Through the Mill (1940), etc. We encourage scholarly papers as well as talks by artists—scholarly or otherwise.