This book brings together contributors from a wide range of disciplines to explore the importance of cotton as a major resource for US fashion businesses. It is rooted in a lengthy investigative research project that deployed undergraduate and graduate students and faculty researchers to US fashion businesses that rely on cotton to make their garments - with the goal of better understanding how such a key resource is sourced, priced, transported, manipulated and, ultimately, sold on to the consumer as a stylish garment. The contributors focus in particular on the role of brands in the marketing of cotton goods, and the way that brand marketing creates distinctions, valuable in the marketplace, between various versions of what are at base similar items of clothing, like t-shirts and underclothes. The book also explores the importance of the 'Made in the USA' campaign, with its appeal to consumers concerned about local manufacturing employment, reduced resource use and social responsibility.

Fashion branding is more than just advertising. It helps to encourage the purchase and repurchase of consumer goods from the same company. While historically fashion branding has primarily focused on consumption and purchasing decisions, recent scholarship suggests that branding is a process that needs to be analyzed from a style, luxury, and historical pop cultural view using critical, ethnographic, individualistic, or interpretive methods.
In this collection, the contributors explore the meaning behind fashion branding in the context of the contested power relations underpinning the production, marketing, and consumption of style and fashion as part of our global culture.