In late-1990s Britain, the salwaar-kameez or 'Punjabi suit' emerged as a high-fashion garment. Popular both on the catwalk and on the street, it made front-page news when worn by Diana, Princess of Wales and by Cherie Booth, the wife of UK Prime Minister Tony Blair.
In her ethnography of the local and global design economies established by Asian women fashion entrepreneurs, Parminder Bhachu focuses on the transformation of the salwaar-kameez from negatively coded 'ethnic clothing' to a global garment fashionable both on the margins and in the mainstream. Exploring the design and sewing...

Punjabi suits have become high-fashion garments modelled by public figures such as Princess Diana, Jemima Khan and Cherie Booth. This text tells the story of Asian fashion in the West, from top designers such as Ritu Kumar and Catherine Walker to the tiny back-street shops, homeworking businesses and street fashions where global markets collide with local and regional trends. It describes how Asian dress has become culturally charged and powerfully coded, defining contemporary cultural and economic borders and debunking negative stereotypes of Asian women as passive and malleable subjects.

Immigration and Entrepreneurship offers a comparative analysis of worldwide immigration issues while focusing more specifically on the emerging influence of entrepreneurship as a potent factor in the economic and social integration of immigrants. In linking the common immigrant and settler experiences with the upsurge in self-employment, the contributors to this volume use California as their base of comparison. The state has both a huge and varied immigrant population and an entrepreneurial economy that has facilitated the formation of immigrant-owned firms. The Los Angeles riots of the...