Book Review: Antonella Ceccagno, City Making and Global Labor Regimes: Chinese Immigrants and Italy’s Fast Fashion Industry

This book analyses the specific labour and production regimes that have underpinned the rise of fast fashion in Italy and have come to characterise the industrial district (ID) of Prato in the decades around the millennium: in 2015, around 30,000 Chinese workers and entrepreneurs worked in almost 5500 businesses (p. 83). At the same time, it is about much more as it focuses on the complex embeddedness of the production regime across scale, the blurred boundaries of formal/informal economies and insiders/outsiders of the ID, as well as the interlinked dynamics across different social and ethnic relations. This ensures the book is of interest to scholars of work and employment, industrial restructuring, Italian IDs, globalisation, migration studies and entrepreneurship alike.