Name: Killer Style
ISBN: 9781771472531

Alison Matthews David

Serah-Marie McMahon

A fascinating look at the harmful history of fashion

How Fashion Has Injured, Maimed, and Murdered Through History

Killer Style

Kim Tyo-Dickerson

Killer Style takes a global view of past and present fashion trends and the resulting dangers with a captivating/disturbing collection of well-known fashion contortions, poisonings and fatalities by body part, "Horrible Heads", "Miserable Middles," and "Unlucky Legs." Readers learn more about Europe's Queen Elizabeth I's Renaissance-era "Lethal Lead Makeup" covering her Smallpox scars and the gruesome details of the desperately unlucky Radium Girls who worked in factories in the United States in the 1920s and were poisoned by the radioactive glow-in-the-dark paint they used for delicately outlining the hours of the day on watch faces. In fact, poison features prominently in the history of fashion:



The authors highlight the often competing demands of the fashion industry to produce mass-consumed fashion items and their factory workers who often toil in dangerous working conditions for incredibly low wages, including modern day denim factories in Turkey where workers had to sandblast jeans for hours on end, creating the popular distressed fashion style while breathing in tiny silica grains that permanently damaged their lungs and caused early death. Emphasis in the text is placed on the ways factory workers have suffered from lax to nonexistent health and safety regulations in their workplaces, including sections "Fighting for Change" about factory catastrophes that bring the famous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in New York City in 1911 and the Rana Plaza Collapse in Bangladesh in 2013 together as examples of workers uniting to assert their rights.

Excellent narrative nonfiction choice for fans of fashion and the more macabre elements of beauty and style, as well as students exploring Sustainable Development Goals, human rights, STEAM topics, and women's studies, grades 6 and up.

Killer Style How Fashion Has Injured, Maimed, and Murdered Through History

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