Ulrich Lehmann brings together methods and ideas from social sciences and material production to offer a new political reading of fashion in today’s post-democracy. Accessing rare source material across a wide range of European languages and cultures, he offers insight into new working structures in the manufacture of garments and textiles. Case studies include the male suit in Alfred Hitchcock’s film North by Northwest (1959), the revolutionary production methods in the work of Carol Christian Poell and the innovative textile manufacture of Bonotto in Molvena (north-East Italy)