The Production of Luxury Exploiting Human Labor in Third World Countries

Tansy E. Hoskins, a writer, journalist, and activist, enters the world of fashion from the other side in her book, revealing it as the production of luxury that exploits human labor in Third World countries.

The author explores this glamorous world by precisely analyzing and uncovering the hidden and invisible; all of this is supported by a wealth of data and statistics that make the critique of Western fashion a bold contribution to revealing the high cost of luxury. Moving from Karl Lagerfeld to Karl Marx, the book examines aspects of consumption and advertising, mediation and diffusion of products and messages in this area, which can also be attributed to the dictate of desirable appearance that causes many young people significant problems.

Sewn to Pain
+Tansy E. Hoskins
Sandorf, Zagreb, 2015.

Meeting other people, socializing outside the family circle, going to cafes, cinema, theater… once meant being a social, civilized being. Today, the stranger is a threatening figure, there is almost no life in the streets and squares, encounters are rare, except in the virtual world… Sennett shows how deprived we are today of the pleasures of vanished life exchanges with fellow citizens, silence and observation become the only way to experience and survive public life, especially street life; everyone believes they have the right to be left alone in public. Due to changes in public life, private life has also suffered, in which we lack ease, playfulness, and discretion that would allow us real and pleasant relationships with those we may never intimately know.

The Disappearance of the Public Man
+ Richard Sennett
Jesenski i Turk, Zagreb, 2015.

Although it was also published in Croatian translation two years ago, ‘The Bet of the Century’, a bestseller by Michael Lewis, has been revitalized due to the film of the same name currently playing in cinemas, which will encourage many to seek out the book. It concerns the current economic crisis that erupted in 2008, from which the world is only slowly and not entirely emerging. Lewis has rarely explained so clearly what exactly happened and why we plunged into one of the most severe crises in history eight years ago. The story of the risk embedded in the assumption of constant growth in real estate prices, a risk that multiplied daily through the creation of securities based on piles of dubious mortgages, Lewis narrates by writing about real people and their experiences.

The Bet of the Century
+ Michael Lewis
Fraktura, Zagreb, 2015.