{"product_id":"the-perfect-fit-9780226815909","title":"The Perfect Fit","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Perfect Fit shows us how globalization works through the many people and places involved in making women's shoes.    We know a lot about how clothing and shoes are made cheaply, but very little about the process when they are made beautifully. In The Perfect Fit, Claudio E. Benzecry looks at the craft that goes into designing shoes for women in the US market, revealing that this creative process takes place on a global scale. Based on unprecedented behind-the-scenes access, The Perfect Fit offers an ethnographic window into the day-to-day life of designers, fit models, and technicians as they put together samples and prototypes, showing how expert work is a complement to and a necessary condition for factory exploitation.    Benzecry looks at the decisions and constraints behind how shoes are designed and developed, from initial inspiration to the mundane work of making sure a size seven stays constant. In doing so, he also fosters an original understanding of how globalization wor\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTrade Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\"The Perfect Fit\u003c\/i\u003e is a strong contribution to the literature on creative work, globalization, and the production of knowledge. And one, I think, that is well worth the read.\"\u003cbr\u003e   * International Sociology *\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eThe Perfect Fit\u003c\/i\u003e will be an excellent piece of global ethnography of work and global production.  While the author classifies \u003ci\u003eThe Perfect Fit\u003c\/i\u003e as materiality-centered cultural sociology, it goes beyond particular disciplinary boundaries, encompassing at least labor studies, economy sociology, cultural sociology, and industrial sociology.\"\u003c\/p\u003e * Social Forces *\u003cbr\u003e\"Hand in hand with a sociology of culture focused on the material, which dialogues with the social studies of science and technology, the sociology of knowledge, and a look at the global embodied in concrete processes and in areas of 'friction,' \u003ci\u003eThe Perfect Fit \u003c\/i\u003eshows us a provocative look at two issues dear to capitalism: the logic of commodities and the problem of creativity.\"\u003cbr\u003e   * Papeles de Trabajo *\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eThe Perfect Fit\u003c\/i\u003e is a brilliant ethnography of the global economy that focuses on the shoe. It is a sweeping but intimate portrait of commodity chains, in which shoes inhabit ecologies of aesthetic judgment and material practice that span the world. The shoe serves in this book as primary informant and guide, leading both Benzecry and the reader through regimes of material creativity and social destruction. It provides shocking insight into the anxiety, ambition and anguish at the heart of globalization.\" -- Chandra Mukerji, University of California, San Diego\u003cbr\u003e\"Individuation and standardization; the local and the global; matters of subjective taste and matters of objective measurement; the things you probably don’t care much about and the thing-makers that care so much about your taste. Benzecry treats each of these evident oppositions within the same frame, and he puts globalization on the firmest of footings.\" -- Steven Shapin, author of 'The Scientific Life and A Social History of Truth'\u003cbr\u003e\"Sometimes it only takes a change of perspective to see the world afresh. And this is what \u003ci\u003eThe Perfect Fit \u003c\/i\u003eoffers. Looking at globalization from the humble point of view of the right feet of shoe models in China, Benzecry masterfully reveals the myriad of actors, miniscule transactions and daily practices required to make global scale fit into a shoe. Through a riveting ethnographic description of how shoes are put together, the book reveals the invisible threads binding the fates of designers in New York, small shoe shops in Italy, and abandoned factories in Brazil. The result is not merely a book about how shoes are done, but also a powerful and timely reflection about the many lives, hopes, and spaces that are caught up, as well as left behind, in the process.\" -- Fernando Domínguez Rubio, author of 'Still Life Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum'\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTable of Contents\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePreface: The Frailty of Commodity Chains\u003cbr\u003e Chapter 1: From Head to Toe\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Part 1: From the Designer’s Point of View\u003cbr\u003e Chapter 2: From “the Global” to “the Girl”\u003cbr\u003e Chapter 3: When Is a Shoe a Shoe?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Part 2: Feet and Fit\u003cbr\u003e Chapter 4: The World at Her Fit: Scale-Making, Uniqueness, and Standardization\u003cbr\u003e Chapter 5: Cinderella on the Pearl River Delta: Who Has the Power to Translate?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Part 3: The Global in the Rearview Mirror\u003cbr\u003e Interlude: A Landscape of Factories\u003cbr\u003e Chapter 6: The Ruins and Rubble of Novo Hamburgo: Skill and Melancholia in a Global Shoe Town\u003cbr\u003e Conclusion: What Did We Learn about Globalization by Looking at Shoes?\u003cbr\u003e Coda: Shoe Is a Gipsy Business\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Acknowledgments\u003cbr\u003e Notes\u003cbr\u003e References\u003cbr\u003e Index","brand":"The University of Chicago Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48732923920727,"sku":"9780226815909","price":29.45,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/1739\/5799\/files\/9780226815909.jpg?v=1719998964","url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/the-perfect-fit-9780226815909","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}