From Production To Consumption

From Production to Consumption
Critical Issues
Series Editors
Dr Robert Fisher
Dr Ken Monteith
Lisa Howard
Dr Daniel Riha
Advisory Board
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Simon Bacon
Kasia Bronk
Jo Chipperfield
Ann-Marie Cook
Phil Fitzsimmons
Peter Mario Kreuter
Mira Crouch
Stephen Morris
John Parry
Karl Spracklen
Peter Twohig
S Ram Vemuri
Kenneth Wilson
A Critical Issues research and publications project.

http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/critical-issues/
The Ethos Hub
Fashion
2013
From Production to Consumption:

The Cultural Industry of Fashion
Edited by
Marco Pedroni
Inter-Disciplinary Press
Oxford, United Kingdom
Inter-Disciplinary Press 2013

http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing/id-press/
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ISBN: 978-1-84888-165-5
First published in the United Kingdom in Paperback format in 2013. First Edition.
Table of Contents
The Crossroad between Production and Consumption:
An Introduction to Fashion as a Cultural Industry
Marco Pedroni
Part 1
Designing and Producing Fashion

The Knock-On from the Knock-Off: Recent Shifts within
Australian Mass Market Fashion Design Practice
Alice Payne
Part 2
Part 3
vii
Everyone Deserves to Dress Well: Democratization of

Fashion in Turkey and the Case of LC Waikiki
Aye Nil Kireci
21
The Invisible Presence of the Internalised Corset:

Post-Feminist Values Materialised in
Marlies Dekkers Lingerie
Danille Bruggeman
37
Communicating Fashion
Meta-Modernism in Fashion and Style Practice: Authorship
and the Consumer
Julianne Pederson
59
Pandora in the Box: Travelling around the World in the

Name of Fashion
Lydia Maria Taylor
75
What is Special in the Collections? Fashion Brands and

Semiotic Saturation
Emanuela Mora
93
Consuming Fashion
The Evolution of the Retail Space from Luxury Malls to
Guerrilla Stores: Tracing the Change of Fashion
Cecilia Winterhalter
111
Sellers of Experience: The New Face of Fashion Retail and

the Role of Consumers as Store Readers
Marco Pedroni
133
An Exploratory Study into the Strategic Significance of

Visual Merchandising: The Case of Vintage
Fashion Retailing
Karinna Nobbs, Julie McColl and Linda Shearer
151
The Political Power of the Online Shop: American Apparels

Virtual Campaign for Immigration Reform
Emma C. McClendon
181
The Crossroad between Production and Consumption:

An Introduction to Fashion as a Cultural Industry
Marco Pedroni
This volume is the dialogic outcome of a debate among fashion scholars that
has its origin in the 3rd Global Conference on fashion, organized by
InterDisciplary.Net and held in Oxford from the 22nd to the 25th of September
2011. The chapters published here are much more than a simple selection of the
papers presented on that occasion and reflect a unitary project, that of exploring the
world of fashion as a cultural industry, as a point of convergence between two
poles: the one of production, in which we include every process of ideation,
designing and manufacturing carried out by professionals working in the fashion
companies, and the one of consumption, an expression that identifies the complex
and heterogeneous group of social actors who face the apparel proposals, by
buying (or not) clothes and in so doing putting them into their everyday lives as
generators of meanings.
The perspective of this volume is grounded in sociology of culture and relies on
the idea of material culture and its objects as a magnifying glass to better
understand the immaterial values rooted in the whole society. We are especially
referring to the works of Paul Hirsch 1 and Wendy Griswold. 2 The former,
analysing the media industry, has developed an interpretative model known as
Hirschs scheme that breaks up the cultural industry in four phases (design,
production, communication, and consumption), whilst the latter has proposed a
cultural diamond to underline how cultural meanings are the result of a
relationship between a social world, a creator (individual or collective), a receiver,
and a cultural object. Within an institutional view of fashion in other words, by
analysing fashion as a social field both approaches will be applied to fashion to
describe it as being a cultural industry and to affirm the perpetual connection
between material contents and immaterial values in this field. Starting from these
premises and promoting an interdisciplinary comparison between scholars afferent
to various disciplines, this printed volume intends to deeply explore the concrete
and material expressions of fashion that connect producers and consumers making
the materiality a door to join the immaterial horizons of fashion.
But before undertaking the issue of the chapters, this introduction will provide a
deeper theoretical framework. Sections 1 and 2 are designed to outline a general
overview of the phenomenon of fashion. The institutional perspective of the
volume is clarified in section 3, by discussing in which sense fashion can be
understood as a system. The key concepts are then considered: Wendy Griswolds
cultural diamond (section 4), the circularity between production and consumption
(section 5) that inspired the title of this book, the role of consumption (section 6)
and the cultural intermediaries (section 7) within this circular relation. At this
point, the reader will be ready to approach a general analysis of the organizational
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scheme of the book that tries to reflect Hirschs model and test the validity of the
cultural diamond. Part I, summarized in section 8, is devoted to the designing and
production processes, whilst Part II (see section 9) focuses on fashion
communication; Part III (outlined in section 10) completes the scheme by tackling
the issue of fashion retailing, assuming stores as being emblematic places for
contemporary fashion consumption.
1. Lightness and Heaviness
What is light? And what is heavy? This is the question struggling the characters
of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the most famous book by the Czech author
Milan Kundera. Life is light because we live it just once, and all choices involved
are fleeting, each moment is ephemeral; but living just once does not allow second
thoughts thus transforming the weight of being into an unbearable one.
Each time I found myself thinking about fashion, each time I prepare a
conference paper or a class for students, Kunderas book comes into my mind and I
tend to apply those same categories: fashion is light or heavy? How does the
triumph of the ephemeral and superficial combine with the undeniable economic
and social weight of fashion? Where is the link between the evanescence of
catwalks and the weight of the underpaid work which make the manufacture of
fashion possible? What do the debates on next season colours have to share with
the considerations done by the German philosopher Georg Simmel on fashion as an
instrument for social inclusion and exclusion?
In order to answer to these questions, it might be useful considering how the
issue of fashion has been dealt in the academic field.
Today, we cannot state anymore, as Gilles Lipovetsky did, that the question of
fashion is not a fashionable one among intellectuals. 3 Fashion has in fact gained
an increasing space in social sciences reflections of the last twenty years, carving
out for itself an autonomous position inside sociology of culture and other
academic disciplines, reaching a relevant number of scholars who define
themselves as fashion studies scholars and meet periodically during the many
interdisciplinary conferences taking places all over the world or, better said, in
those countries which gave enough attention to fashion as a heavy phenomenon
within the national economy and the social imaginary.
Nevertheless, the prejudice depicting fashion as a frivolous issue is still strong,
at least in the geographical (Western Europe) and disciplinary (sociology) context
where the editor of this book is writing from. It is a prejudice deep-rooted in
certain ways of understanding the academic mission, which traditionally dealt with
the most noble manifestations of the Spirit art, religion, institutions neglecting
instead the Materials expressions we find in our everyday life. 4 As the
philosopher Lars Svendsen efficiently puts it, the roots of the relation between
fashion and lightness are ancient: Plato draws the distinction between reality itself
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on the one hand and its appearances on the other, between depth and surface. And
fashion is surface through and through. 5
Authors writing on fashion, a light and superficial object, had thus to justify
their interests on this human behaviour, 6 just as if they were expecting an
unanimous reprehension from the scientific community; Herbert Blumer 7 even
invited explicitly the scientific community to take the issue of fashion seriously.
This is due to the fact that in the intellectual field fashion is considered
Lipovestky goes again as an ontologically and socially inferior domain, it is
unproblematic and undeserving of investigation; seen as a superficial issue, it
discourages conceptual approaches; 8 it is evoked just to be condemned or to
denounce the stupidity of human beings, as if it was just others business. Such
prejudicial resistance might be explained by the words of Bourdieu: Social
scientists tend too easily to assume that the socio-political importance of an object
is in itself sufficient warrant for the importance of the discourse that addresses it. 9
However, marginal objects often includes, in a form which is at time condensed
at time paradoxical, the more general mechanisms which rule the relation between
society and its singular agent. To understand it, we might think to the weight that
fashion has in the identity building process (of group and individual) and the
consumption dynamics, or at its power in conditioning whole economic sectors and
shaping social status, gender and age differences. 10
Lightness and heaviness are therefore combined in an ambivalent profile: the
light hearted change in life styles goes along with the more general political, social
and economic change, and the observer should reflect on how fashion has been,
and still is, involved in the cultural industry of society. 11
2. Fashion and Change
Manuals and introductions to the fashion issue which are always increasing
confirm both the non-topicality of Lipovetskys words and the rising weight of
fashion often start with an etymological clarification, 12 explaining that the word
fashion has been used with two related but different meanings: (a) fashion as
clothing (and all its synonymous: apparel, dress, clothes, garments) and ornament
(or adornment) of the body; (b) fashion as phenomenon of social change, a general
mechanism regulating multiple sectors, including clothing.
The first version, the most limited, has been adopted by sociologists like
Elizabeth Wilson, according to whom fashion is dress in which the key feature is
rapid and continual changing of styles, 13 and historians of art like Anne Hollander,
who defines fashion as the whole range of clothing styles considered attractive in a
precise moment. 14 The reason of this relation is intuitive: even though being
fashionable is an expression used in everyday life not only to describe clothing
phenomena (a car might be fashionable, as well as a diet and an ideological
position), it is through clothing that we can more often see and directly observe the
manifestations of fashion.
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The more extended version, which goes beyond the boundaries of textile world,
is far more accurate in describing the omnivorous form of fashion phenomena. The
American historian William Sumner, 15 at the beginning of the 20th century, already
recognised the control fashion has on many other fields beyond clothing, from
commerce to travel, from transport to shows. Fashion is, hence, one of the typical
forms of collective behaviour, 16 a social phenomenon in continuous expansion
rather than in contraction, working in areas related not only to consumption, but
also embracing art, entertainment, philosophy, science. Restricting fashion to
costumes and ornaments is, according to Blumer, 17 one of the big lackings of
sociological approaches to the issue. It is nevertheless inadequate such an approach
that does not consider the social consequences of fashions phenomenon and sees it
as an irrational one, prejudices which disregard respectively the social imperative
of fashion and its nature of deeply calculated action at the individual level, and
social interactions mechanism. 18
The speed rate of the birth and obsolescence processes of new fashions does not
apply exclusively to clothing collection anymore: the French semiotician Roland
Barthes thesis 19 stating that fashion is a cultural system of meanings, is still valid.
What are then the properties of this system? The first, but not the only, is described
by change. Immanuel Kant, already at the end of the 19th century, looked at
fashions as mutable ways of living. 20 But is it the tendency to change sufficient to
define fashion? We might say that everything is changing, but not that everything
is fashionable. According to Svendsen, 21 something is fashion only if it functions
in a socially distinctive way and is part of a system that replaces it relatively
quickly with something new. 22 Change must be characterised by novelty, and it
must play a function of social differentiation. It is nonetheless a problematic
definition, as the same author recognises, because we might encounter objects
which are neither distinctive nor new but which come to be fashionable again, as
well as distinctive and new objects which never become fashionable.
Both the need for social differentiation and the change for changes sake which
characterises fashion cycles, do not appear universally in all ages and all places,
but they actually appear as historically linked to Western modernity with its break
of tradition. Already in the 14th century Europe, there were the ideal economic and
urban conditions for fashion (starting with clothing and then through its different
manifestations) to express its double nature of being both an individual identitary
tool and a mechanism for the positioning in the social status system: it was an open
society or, more precisely, a complex, stratified and flexible society, 23 where there
was a negotiation of mobile social positions and clothing became an unavoidable
tool for social representation. Society must be articulated and flexible enough to
allow the existence of fashion: it is in fact absent both in small and egalitarian
societies (like primitive ones) and in stratified but strictly hierarchical societies (as
feudal Europe was) where there is no vertical mobility. 24
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To conclude, both if we consider fashion as a clothing phenomenon or if we
recognise its wider meaning as general mechanism regulating multiple sectors (of
which clothing is the paradigmatic but not exclusive one), its characteristics are the
constant changes and the tension toward novelty, which are spies of its social and
cultural nature: fashion always reminds the habitus of social agents involved in its
game, the structure of society and its articulation in social classes, the dynamics of
social integration and differentiation underneath the choices of adopting, refusing,
changing or ignoring fashion; without forgetting its economical, organisational and
productive nature not minor at all since the fashion system involves a plurality
of agents generating economic value in national balance of payments, beyond the
symbolic value generated for producers and consumers.
3. Fashion as a System
Having stated some basic notes on how complex fashion is, we can now move
on exploring what transforms fashion into a system.
First of all, we can say that there are at least three levels of analysis for
fashion: 25 the domain of objects (clothes), that of people (from one side all
professionals working in the fashion production system, on the other consumers)
and their practice, and lastly, the institutional sphere (fashion as social field
regulated by collaborative or conflicting relations between its actors, who are
competing for a stake). This last field, the more sociological one, might be the
most helpful when we come to analyse fashion as social phenomenon looking at
objects as cultural products (not merely pieces of texture anymore) and subjects as
social actors whose action is not isolated but strictly connected to the context, at
the same time influencing it. In this way, differently from objects based approaches
(as costume history) or those based on subjects (for example designers
hagiographies), institutional approaches allow an analysis of fashion as an highly
complex social phenomenon heavy even if looking light, recalling Kunderas
words.
The weight becomes visible if we apply the concept of field, an efficient
metaphor suggested by Pierre Bourdieu. 26 According to the French sociologist,
each portion of the social world 27 might be analysed as a field of physical forces.
In the field, social agents move like particles by occupying positions that stand in
a mutual relationship which we may call hierarchical based, that is, on
domination, subordination, or homology . Those who are part of the field belong to
a network of perpetual struggle to acquire the most sought-after positions. The
field functions like a game, whose participants use their resources as cards to win
a stake (a position preferable to the others). Such resources consist in the forms
of capital with which each agent is endowed: economic, cultural and social kinds
of capital that generate a sort of meta-capital consisting in symbolic capital,
namely the level of prestige and social honour enjoyed by a person. 28
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On the institutional level, avoiding the conflicting tone of the Bourdieusian
analysis, we find different authors who studied fashion as a system. 29 In particular,
Kawamura concentrates on fashion as system of institutions, organizations,
groups, producers, events and practices 30 in which
individuals related to fashion, including designers among many
other professionals, engage in activities collectively, share the
same belief in fashion and participate together in producing and
perpetuating not only the mythology of fashion but also fashion
culture which is sustained by the continuous production of
fashion. 31
Such institutionalized system works as a powerful industry for cultural
meanings whose main function is to transform the materiality of textile production
(clothing) into the immateriality of fashion.
What makes the fashion system an institutionalised one? First of all, the fact
that changes and the rapid alternation of clothing styles are intentionally followed
by the same actors involved in the production of fashion itself 32 and accepted by
consumers. Secondly, the fact that fashion works as a social field: the system
creates boundaries between what is fashion and what is not, and, inside those
boundaries, social actors compete for stakes on different levels obviously
different for producers and consumers: for the first, it means the control over the
production field through the success of a brand, a collection, a designer; for the
latter, the fashion leader status. But in the end, we might state that the general stake
is the ability to transfer/elaborate meaning related to clothes.
The anthropologist Grant McCracken 33 defined fashion, together with
advertisement, a system that transfers cultural meanings to goods consumed by
consumers: fashion, according to the author, is even more powerful than
advertisement because it not only transfers new styles relating them to already
existing cultural categories, but it is also able to create new cultural meanings. If
we accept the idea of a consumer actively engaged in decoding and elaborating the
cultural meaning of dresses, we understand how fashion consumption is
characterised by a constant interpretative work the success of which the fashion
leader status, indeed is given to whom make the best out of its informative capital
(knowledge on fashion, the ability to use clothes as signs, the consciousness of
the communicative value of clothes).
4. The Cultural Diamond
The sociologist Wendy Griswold gave an institutional perspective which might
be really useful to our analysis, elaborating a model known as cultural diamond 34
(see Image 1). The diamond has not been thought for the analysis of the fashion
system, but as a general tool for the sociology of culture which objective is to
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analyse the production of meaning, that is the social meaning and the value given
to objects, behaviours, events, relations. 35 According to Griswold, culture is the
expressive and relational part of human life, and it becomes visible through
behaviour, objects, and ideas that can be seen to express, to stand for, something
else. 36 In a field like fashion, the diamond allows us to depict the functioning of
the social meanings production. The model explains the circulation of cultural
objects, relating them to their affiliation to a socio-cultural context (social world),
to their production made by a creator and to their fruition by a receiver. For
cultural objects, Griswold intends shared significance embodied in form; 37 an
item that tells a story, and thanks to this story it gains a meaning. The author
describes the relation between cultural object and culture through an evocative
metaphor: The cultural object is the leopard frog, and the culture is the marsh. 38
The cultural object has been differently interpreted by cultural studies. In the
simplistic lecture of the mass culture approach, the object prevails on the receiving
subject, considered a passive receiver of a message carrying meanings already
coded by the commodity; in the popular culture model receiver are involved in
the construction of the objects meaning and, through non-conventional
consumption practice, may engage in forms of cultural resistance to mainstream.
Image 1: The cultural diamond (source: Wendy Griswold) 39

We might say, following the latter approach, that a cultural object (the
Armadillo shoe, the colour beige, low-waisted trousers, Prada style) is a gate
relating the creator (meant as individual or collective: 40 both Galliano and the
maison Dior) to the receiver who consequently activates meaning starting from the
object.
There are six possible bidirectional links between the four poles of the cultural
diamond, since each edge interacts with the other three. Sociology has been
traditionally interested to look at the relation between social world and cultural
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object, emphasising the unidirectional movement or the top-bottom one (like in the
case of Marxian and functionalist theories, which state the supremacy of
substructure over superstructure, that is the dependency of culture to the social and
economic organization) or the bottom-up movement (a direction underlined by
Max Weber, who stated that social structures respond to cultural meanings). 41
Other partial perspective on the cultures system are those concentrated only: (a)
on the character of the creator genius, a person of outstanding talent, the only
maker of the cultural objects creation; (b) on the social world as a context
influencing as much the creator as the object (but still lacking the reference to the
receiver as an active pole); (c) on the non-relevance of the creator, a perspective
which transform the cultural object in a product of collective representation. 42
Griswold herself, discussing diamonds characteristics, suggests a model by
Paul Hirsch proposed decades ago which might substitute and enrich the horizontal
axe of the diamond, the model of the culture industry system (see Image 2).
Image 2: The culture industry system and the cultural diamond

(adapted from Paul Hirsch and Wendy Griswold) 43
It is a model elaborated referring to industries working in the media field, 44 but
Griswold is able to use it efficiently in the analysis of cultural objects and,
according to this approach, in this book we will apply it to fashion industry. 45
According to Hirsch, the culture industry system is defined by a constant
research for innovation. If innovation is fundamental also for manufacturing
industries, since it gives economic success, in cultural industries this is the main
goal of the whole production because the cultural product must not fulfil a mere
practical function, but it has to satisfy the consumers desire for novelty and
change. The task of the culture industry system is therefore to select those goods
which will circulate in the market, playing an intermediation role between the
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would-be cultural creators (who are exceeding the demand) and the uncertainty of
the demand (nobody can say exactly how much a movie will be welcomed). We
may say that the system has a regulative function, transforming creativity into
predictable, marketable packages. 46
This system is composed by four subsystems: (a) the technical subsystem,
which is represented by the creators in the Griswolds diamond; (b) the managerial
subsystem, which are the organizations such as publishing houses, record
companies, film studios, fashion houses; the managerial subsystem maintain
contact men 47 on both sides (at its right and its left), filtering what comes in
(input boundary) and what goes out (output boundary) of the organization; (c) the
institutional subsystem, made up by professionals working in media reviewing,
talking about, discussing cultural objects and their creators; (d) finally, consumers
(the receivers in the diamond), recipients of the cultural objects and the messages
related to those objects diffused by media. To make it simpler, I will then call these
four subsystem respectively: (a) design, (b) production, (c) communication, (d)
consumption.
The interesting parts in Hirschs model are the empty areas which work as
filters between subsystems. The first filter is represented by boundary spanners
like agents or talent scouts, who filter the exceeding supply (the too many creators:
aspiring novelists, bands, screenplays authors, stylists) connecting to the producing
organization only who are considered the brightest creators. This is the input
boundary of the managerial subsystem. The second filter, which is indeed the
output boundary, is represented by the personnel who has to keep the relations with
mass-media through creating and distributing information on products, brands,
creators. Not everything that media gets, reaches the consumers: this is the role of
the third filter that selects the information on cultural objects reaching the
receivers.
This flux is characterized by two kinds of feedback: the answer of media (the
attention gained by the last fashion show, positive or negative reviews of
journalists) and that of consumers (the sales; today, the comments on blogs,
forums, Facebook pages, etc.).
In my opinion, the combined use of the two proposals by Griswold and Hirsch
has at least four advantages. In the first place, the relation between consumption
and production has been dealt with a wider theoretical framework which considers
the social worlds role and the cultural object as a pole related to context, creator,
and receiver. Secondly, the diamond links the three analytic levels cited in the
previous paragraph, underlining the reciprocal relations: institutional (a cultural
industry as a system, e.g.: fashion), objects (the cultural artefact) and subjects
(creators). In the third place, we shall see how it does not exist a circularity
between production and consumption, but further internal micro-circularity in
those processes connecting creators to receivers. Finally, the abstract statement on
the existence of a relation between production and consumption is filled by
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subjects: those who work in the subsystems, but also the connecting characters
working as filters.
In this brief list, there are two aspects which deserve a further analysis (what I
am willing to do in next paragraphs): the idea of a circularity between production
and consumption and the centrality of the latter and the role of the contact
men on the boundaries of subsystems.
5. Circularity between Production and Consumption
Some famous research by Paul du Gay and others on the Sony Walkman 48 was
focused on the idea that production and consumption of a cultural object were
linked together by a circular relation rather than by an exclusively bidirectional
one. Walkman was created because, on one side, the Japanese company was
searching for innovation and success on the global market, and on the other side, it
was able to read and interpret consumers behaviour. Looking at this product, we
can see how production and consumption are not just two poles of a commodity
chain, but interacting processes inside a cultural circuit where products have a
double function: they both reflect and transform consumer practices.
The interconnection between production and consumption may be analysed
emphasising the power producers have to create demand or the processes
transforming consumers in highly reflexive actors who got a consuming Self. The
first focus is the one adopted by Frank in his research on hip consumerism, where
the author shows how in the 60s, thanks to a communication strategy constructing
the hip consumer ideal type, clothing has been proposed as a choice of the more
creative and cool youths. The second focus, as Zukin and Maguire put it:
Accounts of modernity trace the development of this new self to
the process of individualization [...], in which identity shifts from
a fixed set of characteristics determined by birth and ascription to
a reflexive, on-going, individual project shaped by appearance
and performance. The roots of this shift lie in urbanization and
industrialization, which open access to an array of new goods
and experiences, while at the same time permeating the core of
the family and extending interdependencies. With people living
more rational, anonymous lives, traditionally stable frameworks
for group and individual identity such as family, religion,
class, and nationality weaken and are modified or abandoned.
The individual is then free to choose his or her path toward selfrealization, taking on an opportunity and obligation once
reserved for the elite. 49
Nevertheless, what is really interesting in here beyond the fact that we can
focus more on one pole or the other is that, in fashion, production and
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consumption interact through a dialectic tension which result in fashion items. This
circular interaction 50 is particularly powerful since fashion works as a cultural
industry connecting producers activity to consumer practices and expectations.
As any other industry, fashion system can be seen as a classic supply chain
from the production of raw materials to the manufacture of garments to the
retailing and consumption of finished products. 51 But to the manufacture aspects
the cultural one is added. Cultural industry is a well-known term used by critical
theorists Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment,
published in 1944, which indicated the commodification of culture. The very
pessimistic perspective on capitalist societies of those Frankfurt School scholars
saw the transformation of the production of cultural contents in industrial process
and intellectual works becoming standardized goods consumed by a mass audience
which is undifferentiated and basically passive due to the fact that consumers were
stimulated by false desires thanks to the powerful advertisement machine
which may be satisfied only through consumption goods.
The French philosopher and sociologist Edgar Morin 52 reconsidered the
cultural industry theory as a tool for the manipulation of consciousness, underlying
how it acts as an industry producing desires and collective expectations. Referring
in particular to cinema as an imaginary industry, the author recognises the
collaboration between producers of social imaginary and its users: the first use
archetypes of the collective imaginary in order to create products inside which
consumers identify their desires. In cultural industry, however, a certain creative
ability is still present, and it generates new contents together with those
standardized and stereotyped ones.
According to Justin OConnor, 53 today cultural industries (here used in the
plural form to recognise their variety) can be defined as those activities dealing
with goods whose economic value is derived by their cultural value, that is,
symbolic goods. Following this definition, symbolic goods are thus the ones
generated by the classical cultural industries broadcast media, film, publishing,
recorder music, design, architecture, new media the traditional arts visual art,
crafts, theatre, music theatre, concerts and performance, literature, museums and
galleries, and new industries as fashion. Adorno and Horkheimers sentence
consequently loses its ideological connotation, to point two characteristics which
fashion share with other cultural industries, as Emanuela Mora tells us: 54 the
regulatory function in the relation between material and immaterial contents and its
ability to address its audiences stimulating their desires and suggesting models of
behaviour and attitudes. It is just too clear that producing clothes does not mean
creating textile pieces, as well as producing movies does not mean transferring
images on a film: the value of clothing lies in the interweaving of its material and
immaterial components. The immaterial ones are the results of a complex work of
representation made by catwalks, advertisements, fashion magazines, sales stores 55
and by any other communication focused on value related (or which might be
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related) to product and brand. Transforming a creative idea into a cultural product
that reaches the consumer means getting the two poles of the diamond interacting
with each other, generating a complex meaning production whose vector is the
fashion item.
6. The Role of Consumption
We said that fashion has been kept for a long time outside social sciences.
Previously, consumption had a similar faith. 56 For a long time, the study of
consumption has been influenced by Marxist perspective on objects seen as
goods, artefacts produced by workers then taken away from them to be
introduced in the market, creating a gap between the producing subject and its
product. Marxist homo faber is consequently expropriated from his production, and
his alienation benefits those who held economic power that is, in the capitalistic
system, the owners of means of production. 57 When the object turns into good it
becomes a fetish carrying false symbolic meaning completely unrelated to those
social relations which made the production of the object possible. More recently,
the French philosopher and sociologist Jean Baudrillard elaborated the thesis on
goods fetishism underlining that goods are fetishes because in contemporary
society they are bought for what they represent in a particular socio-cultural
context and not for what they really are that is, for the value they get as signs.
Those signs generate an auto-referential system defined by Baudrillard as hypereality. 58 These brief quotations by a tradition of thinking would deserve a deeper
analysis, but we are now using them to show how difficult it has been to accept
that consumption goods are an important part of our everyday lives beyond being
potential tools for the construction of our individual identity. Far before the postmodern theories raise consumption culture as peculiar characteristic of
contemporary age, 59 a number of theories focused on the consumption practices:
starting from Veblen research 60 on leisure class and goods as status symbols, to
Bourdieus work 61 on goods as taste emblem and on consumption as class habitus,
through the fundamental revalorization of popular culture made by British Cultural
Studies. The myth of consumption as sense making process, pushed some scholars
to reaffirm the importance of materiality and manufacturing: as Tim Edwards 62
puts it, fashion is not just about consumption leading production; manufacturing
characteristics first of all, the wide use of work exploitation might be erased
only during the communication phase of the product, but they do not disappear
form the supply chain.
The definitions of consumption as a social and cultural process, not only an
economic one, 63 and not as a mere act try to underline the complexity implied
in the choice of goods or services, but also experiences, which satisfy desires and
define individual and social lifestyles. These definitions are also trying to express
the identity of the social actor, 64 within a complex double tension between
imitation and differentiation in respect to others, 65 where our intention to
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communicate and at the same time our affiliation to some groups and our nonmembership to others become clear. Consumption is not a mere economic
transaction and neither a self-exhausting action, but the end (or the beginning) of a
process, which might be seen as a manifestation of personal freedom or, on the
contrary, a social duty the duty of consuming what our own social class
requests. 66 Both the interpretations show the cultural and reflexive character of
material consumption: objects are, in fashion and in cultural industries, cultural
goods, they are full of meanings. These meanings are not just the ones encoded
in the products by the producers, but they are also the ones generated by the use by
the consumers.
For the researcher, recognising fashion as a cultural industry producing relevant
objects in the everyday life does not mean giving up to the supposed power of
goods or producers. Zukin and Maguires invitation The point of a sociological
study is neither to praise nor to condemn consumers, but to understand how, and
why, people learn to consume, over time, in different ways 67 should be just half
welcomed: in my personal view, a descriptive analysis must go along with an
analysis of the relation of power inside the field. Consumption practices, in this
sense, are a starting point (as other poles of the diamond can be) in the analysis of
how balances of power between actors participating in fashion field are built and
shaped. If fashion is a cultural industry producing meanings, an always relevant
question for the researcher is: who is producing (or is contributing to the
production of) these meanings, in which way and with which goal? How some
meanings are legitimated, that is how are they recognised as valid inside the field?
7. The Cultural Intermediaries
In order to answer previous questions, another category the last I will
introduce in these pages can help us: the cultural intermediaries. Fashion is a
complex system where design and production are widespread and collective
processes, 68 strictly connected not only to communication but also to consumption.
Within various processes, some actors work as nodes and gatekeepers more than
others, like the contact men described by Hirsch, who were playing their part in
those grey areas between subsystems (characters like talent scout, promoter, PR,
press coordinator) functioning as filters.
The category of cultural intermediaries has been coined by Bourdieu in his
most well-known work, Distinction, originally published in 1979. The French
sociologist focuses in particular on the phenomenon of new professions and the readaptation of already existing jobs, understating them as a way of escaping the
social declassification:
Those sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie who are threatened
with down classing tend to move, if they possibly can, into the
most indeterminate of the older professions and into the sectors
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where the new professions are under construction. This creative
redefinition is therefore found particularly in the most illdefined and professionally unstructured occupations and in the
newest sectors of cultural and artistic production, such as the big
public and private enterprises engaged in cultural production
(radio, TV, marketing, advertising, social science research and so
on), where jobs and careers have not yet acquired the rigidity of
the older bureaucratic professions and recruitment is generally
done by co-option, that is, on the basis of connections and
affinities of habitus, rather than formal qualifications. 69
Bourdieu describes with the expression new cultural intermediaries the
increasing number of jobs with an high cultural capital, engaged in providing
symbolic goods and services. 70 This petit bourgeoisie that Lash and Urry 71
referred to as a new service class experiences a great growth starting from the
60s, in that France studied by Bourdieu, at the same time when a consumerist
model was asserting itself where cultural intermediaries take the role of shapers of
taste and the inculcators of new consumerist dispositions. 72
They are intermediary occupations involving information and knowledge
intensive forms of work that have come to be seen as increasingly central to
economic and cultural life. 73 For those professions, the cultural capital, the
familiar non-scholastic one, that is the capital transferred from the family through
good taste and manners, was much more important than the formal scholastic
degrees. The rise of these new professions is related to the transformation having
occurred in supremacy forms in the direction of a symbolic manipulation:
The emergence of this new petite bourgeoisie, which employs
new means of manipulation to perform its role as an intermediary
between the classes and which by its very existence brings about
a transformation of the position and dispositions of the old petite
bourgeoisie, can itself be understood only in terms of changes in
the mode of domination, which, substituting seduction for
repression, public relations for policing, advertising for authority,
the velvet glove for the iron fist, pursues the symbolic integration
of the dominated classes by imposing needs rather than
inculcating norms. 74
Bourdieu describes this soft manipulation as symbolic violence, a smooth
violence, invisible to its own victims, perpetuated through the purely symbolic
means of communication and knowledge, which means those professional sectors
where cultural intermediaries work.
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Those intermediaries show some peculiar characteristics: (a) an high cultural
capital, partly constructed inside domestic environments and partly acquired at
school, where is however still very present a self-teaching attitude: with some
kind of educational degrees, they anyhow invented a job going outside coded
professional careers, learning from themselves what anybody could ever clearly
teach; (b) they operate in strategic sectors of communication and research, working
on daily basis with the issue of the immaterial and symbolical meaning of
consumption objects and cultural processes; (c) they interpret the double role of
perfect consumers and consumptions amplifiers toward a wider audience,
making the games of distinction and the possibilities of exterior symbolic signs
available to a larger public, when they have always been available just for elevated
classes; in this role of consumers and producers of distinction, as well as taste
arbiters; 75 (d) they have a key role in legitimizing cultural practices and symbols
(the reason why Bourdieu defines them new intellectuals), since they define the
legitimate tastes spreading them within wider audience; (e) they systematically
apply the cultivated dispositions to not-yet-legitimate culture, 76 as when fashion is
treated like art.
Cultural intermediaries work in media, arts, information and entertainment
industries and we can add fashion too. In their activity, a central role is played by
symbolic production, and this frequently means the use of advertising imagery,
marketing and promotional techniques. 77
Being intermediaries means being in between. Thus, they are located half way
between production and consumption with the task of opening new cultural
consumption fields and linking economic and cultural objectives within what Lush
and Urry called cultural economy. 78
The cultural intermediaries category has at least two theoretical benefits shown
by further research. 79 In the first place
they shift our attention away from the over-emphasis on the
moment of consumption that has tended to dominate recent
accounts of the commercial field. In doing so, they open up the
links between production and consumption and the interplay
between these discrete moments in the lifecycle of cultural
forms. 80
In second place:
The central strength of the notion of cultural intermediaries is
that it places an emphasis on those workers who come inbetween creative artists and consumers (or, more generally,
production and consumption). It also suggests a shift away from
unidirectional or transmission models of cultural production
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towards an approach that conceives of workers as intermediaries
continually engaged in forming a point of connection or
articulation between production and consumption. 81
Hirschs contact men have similar filter function to that of Bourdieus cultural
intermediaries. However, from my point of view, cultural intermediaries also work
on other links of the cultural diamond by Wendy Griswold: the vertexes of the
diamond are connected not really by a mysterious force but through social actors
able to interact with the social world and the meanings of the cultural object. From
a Bourdiesian perspective, these links have a negative meaning, because cultural
intermediaries work as a transmission belt for the taste of the dominant class. A
more possibilist interpretation has been suggested by Laura Bovone, 82 based on a
thesis by Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood: goods are neutral, while their use is
social, and thus they can act as barriers or bridge between social classes a
statement recalling the inclusive or exclusive power of fashion in the thesis by
Georg Simmel. Similarly, also professionals of communication and cultural
intermediaries may work as manipulators, within the dominance logic proposed by
Bourdieu, or they may bridge social classes, connecting the logics of different
social groups without imposing to subordinates the lites taste. We should take
into account the context in which Bourdieu formulated his thesis when dealing
with the debate on the manipulative function of cultural intermediaries, and also
consider the fact that those new intellectuals searching for legitimization in the
60s gained social distinction and transformed their uncertain professions into
institutionalized roles which have a primary importance in the fields of cultural
production. This suggest today a use of the category of cultural intermediaries
which refers to other professions in addition to those originally indicated in
Distinction, and its usefulness as a general category able to identify those subjects
who can establish new relations between production and consumption. We still
need to analyse how the mediation between production and consumption occurs,
and consider the possibility that cultural intermediaries have a soft manipulative
function.
For what concern Hirschs work, he does not have the theoretical ambitions of
Bourdieu, and his article does not give a social or cultural description of contact
men; he does not give them, as Bourdieu does, a precise social position, neither an
intellectual function, but he just consistently with the objectives declared at the
beginning of his paper describes their role as filter and connection between
different areas of the more general system of cultural industry in the passage from
production to consumption. It would be misleading thus to keep on comparing
contact men and cultural intermediaries. Nevertheless, I do prefer this last
expression, because of its theoretical implications and because it underlines how
such connecting work is everything but neutral, since it widely depends on the
social face of the actors who bears it.
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The cultural intermediary is something more than a gatekeeper, a contents
selectors or an agenda setter who is producing partial version of complex events.
The contact men recalls the idea of a keeper of cultural production, the guardian
of the gates, who is consequently protecting the boundaries of a cultural
productions field, deciding who is legitimated for the access and who is not: the
gallery manager who is deciding which artists to show, the editor of a publishing
house who is excluding or including new author from the legitimate status of
writers simply accepting or rejecting their works. Cultural intermediaries category
instead shows us something more: it is emphasizing the two directions of the
relation between production and consumption in a clearer way than the feedback
mechanisms described by Hirsch, because the intermediary is a two-headed
character, both producer and consumer; he is involved in the production of what he
would like to consume. Above all, working in communication and knowledge
fields, cultural intermediaries are the main creators of the meanings embedded in
cultural objects. Through this meaning production work, they have the power to
constantly question the boundaries and the characteristics of the field in which they
operate. Thanks to them, or because of them, fashion became so light to be heavy,
ever-present in the social world and in the imaginary of consumers.
8. Designing and Producing Fashion
After this wide theoretical preliminary, we can now move to analyse the
structure of this book trying to understand if and how each single chapter helps in
defining how fashion works as system and field, how the four poles of the cultural
diamond are connected, and which is the role of cultural intermediaries in these
processes.
The book is divided into three parts. Each of them corresponds to one or more
subsystems among those depicted by Paul Hirsch forming the horizontal axe of
Griswolds diamond. Chapters, written by authors with a heterogeneous
disciplinary background, are proposed as access points for analysing through
specific cases the functioning of fashion as a system. In this way the volume ranges
from the lightness of the Pandora doll to the heaviness of the campaign Legalize
L.A. by American Apparel, from the Turkish fast fashion brand LC Waikiki to
flagship stores, with the intention to test theory with empirical cases. For this
reason, even if the chapter order has been studied to give to the reader a logical and
consistent line of argument, chapters can be read in any preferred order.
Furthermore, as it will be clear, all chapters transcend the boundaries of their
section further evidence of the interconnectivity of fashion subsystems. First
section collects chapters related to design and production.
Alice Paynes chapter analyses the evolution of a fashion design practice in the
Australian mass market from a knock-off model to a knock-on one. The first
model is a description of an imitation practice long interesting Australian designers
who were just copying or inspiring from the Northern Hemispheres collections,
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especially because the Southern Hemisphere fashion is a season behind the seasons
in Europe, North America and Asia. The knock-off is also a model expressing the
geographical marginality which relegated Australia to a peripheral role also on a
cultural point of view in fashion field. The acceleration of fashion cycles together
with the spreading of e-commerce and the new presence of Western retailers in
Australia, has recently given to consumers an enormous variety of stylistic supplies
in line (and not delayed anymore) with northern trends pushing also mass market
industries to leave the way of imitation, to adopt a knock-on model oriented to
innovative creative and original production, where local independent designers find
their space, and in general where the Australian culture of fashion can be
expressed.
In Paynes chapter the notion of place-market has a central role. The notion has
been elaborated by Lise Skov, and it is the ability of fashion design to fill a
cosmopolitan form with local content. 83 Payne applies this concept, which was
thought for the ready-to-wear designers, to the Australian mass market sector to
state that the slow but progressive transition from a knock-on model is giving to
Australian voice a place in the global choir of styles determining an original
compromise between international trends and local peculiarities.
The global/local popularity is however a theme also in Aye Nil Kirecis
chapter dedicated to LC Waikiki, a fast fashion Turkish brand merging the Western
fashion trends with local styles, concerned about both Islamic religious instances
and the physical appearance of Turkish consumers. Less known than the dominant
Zara, H&M and Mango, LC Waikiki is described as the peculiar Turkish
declination in fast fashion market. The distinguishing challenge of the brand is to
accommodate the diverse components of Turkish social world: the more traditional
and Islamic, with the secularist one. Kireci intersects different analytic layers:
from a theoretical level she considers the issue of the democratization of fashion,
of which the fast fashion industries are the most powerful vectors today. The case
study on LC Waikiki strategies is constantly referring to the problems of products
reception. Consumers are frequently stimulated by feedback requests and by the
designers presence in stores. Not usual is, besides, the attention for the Turkish
consumer body and its measures, helpful research for production. Hence the
chapter shows how production is strongly oriented to consumption underlying a
very deep circularity.
If Paynes designers and Kirecis brand are two diverse examples of the
creator vertex of the Griswolds diamond, where we can notice the tight link
between production and designing, Danille Bruggeman offers an example of
cultural object: the lingerie of the Dutch fashion designer Marlies Dekkers, seen as
both material object of fashion and item to wear and create a fashion body.
Dekkers underwear is designed as being outerwear, to be (partly) visible. While
lingerie should be identified as a means and sign of womens oppression, this
powerful use suggests an idea of independence and strength and make lingerie a
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tool to performing femininity in a post-feminist era. The controversial production
of Marlies Dekkers that in the designers aim is a way to destroy the stereotypical
image of female bodies as sex objects, has encountered much criticism including
one to be pornographic and degrading for women. Bruggeman reads this
ambivalence by referring to the duplex nature of underwear that could be viewed
as a sign of oppression or liberation, as in the case of the corset, passed from being
a synonymous of constriction and pain to be used as symbol of rebellion by early
1970s Punk and Goth subcultures, till its appearance in Westwood and Gaultiers
1980s collection. Using underwear as outerwear is the quintessential feature of
Dekkers post-feminist approach, because it tells the story of an empowered and
independent woman, on the one side, who does not renounce to be attractive and
sexually active. So Dekkers lingerie perfectly expresses the post-feminism ideals
with its contradictions as a kind of internalised corset: while underwear is visible,
the self-regulation of female bodies becomes part of post-feminist women habitus
at the crossroad between independence and hyper sexualisation. Given that the
object does not self-define, the definition is made in its relation with social worlds
which acknowledge Dekkers provocation with antithetic meanings.
The socio-cultural context is otherwise crucial not only in influencing the
cultural object comprehension but also the creators and producers practices. This
aspect emerges clearly in the first part of the volume: as Dekkers expresses a deep
idea of Dutchness, also Payne and Kireci underline the importance of national
contexts (Australia and Turkey) in defining the creative activities in fashion. The
three chapters add to the interdisciplinary approach of the volume a transnational
perspective considering examples of cultural productions coming from three
different countries (and continents).
In the cases considered in this volume, designers are the main cultural
intermediaries. The Australian ones, Payne shows, elaborate on compromise
between global and local cultures, through an action which implicitly is political
the partial liberation from the state of subjection and cultural marginality which
forces Australia to be a follower of international trends. Even more political is
Dekkers activity, who conceives its activity not as a mere clothing design but as a
post-feminist instance declaration. It uses other cultural intermediaries in order to
do this, the photographers of advertisement campaigns, who transmit the
immaterial values of the brand enhancing the designers intentions. Finally, in LC
Waikiki we notice that the conjunction role between production and consumption
is performed as much as by designers, send to stores to interact with consumers, as
by researchers and marketing professionals always searching for feedbacks and
studying the Turkish consumer typologies and the forms of its body.
The cases here briefly described can be represented in this way, through the
cultural diamond (see Images 3, 4, and 5).
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Image 3: The cultural diamond applied to the knock-on design practice

(Payne).
Image 4: The cultural diamond applied to Turkish fast fashion (Kireci).
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Image 5: The cultural diamond applied to Marlies Dekkers lingerie (Bruggeman).

9. Communicating Fashion
The second part of the volume considers the communication phase by exploring
heterogeneous issues, such as Pandora doll as an informative tool, the problems
related to the current surplus of information and the role of subversion by author
and message receivers, then sketching some future perspectives as the return to
materiality and the success of ethical fashion.
Julianne Pedersons analysis shifts on a more theoretical level. The cultural
object she is talking about is not a specific product, but the code of fashion,
which means the language used by fashion in the sense making process. Her
examination uses the concept of meta-modernism, one of the non-rare attempts to
label the current era in opposition to, or related to, modernity. According to
Vermeulen and van den Akker, 84 the meta-modern behaviour consists in an
oscillation between the modern yearning of universal truths and the post-modern
relativism, between construction and deconstruction, searching for a new grand
narrative (a large-scale theory and philosophy of the world, as pointed by the
French philosopher Jean-Franois Lyotard), 85 conscious of the fact that such metanarrative might not exist or in any case being problematic. Pederson uses the term
meta-modernism referring to the practice of our everyday lives as digital and
multimedia bricoleurs, stating that in fashion communication the difference
between author and consumer has been blurred, and the space between has been
occupied by the majority contaminating the codes ink. Here comes the problem
for lite the actors controlling communication, from the side of production
whose aim is to enforce the idea that they are the inventors of the code, as such
having the access to that ultimate truth derived from the possibility to manipulate
the code itself, by creating a distance between authors and readers.
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This static vision, according to Pederson, has been definitely altered by
subordinates the actors who have received until now the communication as
receivers who are conscious of the fact that they are just making the code along
with the lites. This is clearly shown by fashion bloggers, example of how the new
modes of communication give to multimedia communicators the power of
authorship and credibility necessary to work in the world of fashion.
The code is altered also because this communication passes through a format
that frequently alters the meaning or the intention of the author (for example, the
Twitter 140 characters), thus we can say that the code is mutating as rapidly as
technology allows it to. This mutation of the code obviously creates anxiety in
mark makers and gatekeepers, the traditional guardians of the message and of its
authenticity, by giving birth to a phenomenon of decentralization of the traditional
geographic fashion and style centres. Fashion bloggers act as active consumers
who are able to re-appropriate and subvert the intent of fashion brands and their
images and texts. In short, Pederson states, the lites are losing control of their
division of space and sense of place. The communication hierarchy is broken and
readers turn into interpreters and consumers, constructing and deconstructing ideas
and objects to suit their individual wants and needs. The situation resembles a clash
between two generations of cultural intermediaries: the old one controlling the
communication code inside the fashion system, and the new one opposing
resistance to the manipulation of the code, in an attempt of regaining the
possession of it. The point, in Pedersons view, can be summarised as follows: the
ones who were once considered subordinates have now irreversibly altered the
language, delivery methods, and hierarchically ordering designations of those who
were considered producers versus the one who were considered mere consumers.
Theres a merging of producers and consumers to the point that the consumer may
become a more influential author of style as a product, template and strategic
method of positioning via technocratic expressions and performative utterances.
Otherwise, we can add, business marketing is trying to regain a lost centrality,
adopting communication practices of those consumers turned into authors. The
oscillation, typically meta-modernist, implies the fact that the spectator becomes a
performer, and gatekeepers, as they see their power loosening, chase the new
communication invented by subordinates. The result is a mutually beneficial and
circular relationship between consumers and authors.
Lydia Maria Taylor takes us back three centuries ago analysing an unusual and
unexpected communication tool for fashion which was very famous in the 18th
century: the doll. In a fashion system where Paris was the undisputed capital of
styles, a doll named Pandora leaves from the French fashion houses and enters the
department stores and the bourgeois homes in England, being invited as much as in
European courts as in those on the other side of the Atlantic. Dressed with fashion
clothes, Pandora became at the same time a travelling mannequin and a
saleswoman, vector of la page French styles. An emissary of fashion, indeed, in
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an epoch without fashion shows, fashion glossy magazines globally spread,
televisions, web sites and blogs. This precursor of Barbie was a visual presentation
tool in the world of fashion, a tool for spreading styles a visual presentation
which today, according to Julianne Pederson (next chapter), lost relevance in the
fashion system.
Bringing us back to the past, Taylors chapter gives us a better perception of the
intense transformations which characterized the way fashion is communicated.
Transformations which became clearer starting from the second post war period, as
the number of fashion producers were increasing, the advertisement and the mass
media communication were intensified and woman and youth subcultures took a
new role in fashion. 86
Emanuela Moras chapter continues the reflection on fashion communication,
considering the phenomenon of semiotic saturation: fashion industries, through the
powerful weapon of visual and iconic communication, create a perpetual
communication flux emphasising the immaterial meanings of the brand in an
attempt of creating in consumers a positive association between the brand and
values such as exclusivity, beauty, novelty, glamour, and differentiating its brand
from competitors. Nonetheless, the communication panorama reached never
registered levels of saturation, and for the consumer it is really hard to get the
differences not only among brands of the same segment, but also among brands of
different sectors, since also mass market and fast fashion widely use attractive
advertisements similar to those used by luxury brands focused on the value of
uniqueness. Emanuela Mora shows us the contradictory nature of this
phenomenon: the increasing number of brands at every level, merged in a
marmalade where differences disappear, on the one side, it turns the consumer
into an expert with a consciousness applied when choosing and buying, and on the
other, it confuses the consumer since its selective capacity is saturated by a surplus
of visual codes. In a world where everything is white, nothing is really white
anymore.
The semiotic saturation works on two directions. If we represent fashion as a
pyramid with luxury brands of top and mass market at the bottom, we notice a
horizontal saturation (the impossibility to distinguish brands of the same level) and
a vertical one (the confusion among brands of different levels). The ultimate result
of this saturation is, according to Mora, an escape from global brands toward niche
brands and a return to the desire of materiality after the hangover of immateriality
of the past decades. The most sophisticated consumers provided with cultural
capital, manifest a renewed interest for the physical qualities and the craft skills
embedded in fashion items. A field able to answer those needs a niche field
always more at the centre of the interest of consumers and fashion scholars is the
sustainable fashion field, a space which is representing an alternative model to
global fashion thanks to its attention to working processes and its ethical concerns
on fashion supply chain.
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In this path, where the semiotic saturation represents the context where the
brand image object is welcomed and interpreted, Mora shows us the circularity
between communication, production, and consumption: the communication
excesses leading to semiotic saturation create a new kind of consumer, who is
escaping from the confusion of the jungle of global brands, and they are also
giving new possibilities to a type of production which is challenging the basement
of the fashion industry, proposing a diverse productive paradigm and a new ethic
sensitivity.
The images 6, 7 and 8 translate the proposal by Pederson, Taylor and Mora in
cultural diamonds form.
Image 6: The cultural diamond applied to the meta-modernist practices of fashion

communication (Pederson).
Image 7: The cultural diamond applied to Pandora doll (Taylor).
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Image 8: The cultural diamond applied to semiotic saturation (Mora).

10. Consuming Fashion
The final section is focused on the consumption of fashion, in a way that may
seems unusual. The chapters do not consider directly the consumer, instead the
places where rituals of consumption take place. The result is an organic coverage
on the different facades of the contemporary fashion retail, where authors chapters
give a complete overview of the transformations occurred in the last two decades.
The historian scholar Cecilia Winterhalter analyses the wide offer of retailing
spaces from a chronological perspective, starting from the 1980s and tracing the
evolution of fashion retail. Such course develops in four stages. The birth of
concept stores, megaspaces for sales, of monumental size, designed by architectstars, with a minimalist style and massive dimensions, like the Epicentres designed
by Rem Koolhas for Prada; with the concept stores of the 1980s the idea of sale
stores not centred on the merchandise only gained strength. Such liberation from
the slavery to products leads to the birth in the 1990s of the concept stores, real
lifestyle emporiums where a variety of goods has been sold: fashion goes along
with art, music, design, food and culture within a multifunctional space which
looks like a museum; not the cold museum represented by the flagship stores, but
the contemporary museum thought as an interactive space. In fact, the same store
manager of the emblematic store 10 Corso Como in Milan must have, in a certain
way, the competencies a museum curator has. The third passage is the pop-up
store, a space that appears as rapidly as it disappears, unhinging the principle of
temporal continuity and that of geographical presence which was a characteristic of
the sale store until that time. These spaces with a bazaar-line nature got their
inspiration from a proper manifesto, the Guerrilla Rules by Comme des Garons,
which was used by the Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo to launch the idea of a
store intended to be an installation and a performance more than a sales store. The
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course ends with the market based store concept represented by the London Dover
Street Market, a department store shaped as a traditional market with features of an
artists collective: the relational dimension is enhanced and the boundaries between
commerce from one side and culture and art from the other are intentionally
questioned. Winterhalter explains this evolution with the establishment of postmodernity 87 and its changes: the emphasis on immateriality, concepts and
consumers which substitute the centrality on materiality, objects and producers,
generating a new relation between the poles of production and consumption which
can be described as a consumers immersion in retail conceived as an experience
instead of an act of mere purchase. We know from Emanuela Moras chapter that
an excess in immateriality can paradoxically lead us to a new desire for materiality.
If Winterhalters structure reflects her historical background, Marco Pedroni
faces the same issue with a sociological approach considering the same categories
of retailing trying to put them in a conceptual map. The main fashion retail formats
are described by positioning them in a two-axis map that considers the nature of
the store (multibrand vs. single-brand) and its ability to offer an exciting
experience to the customer (high experience/symbolic power vs. low power). The
fashion retail panorama today shows, according to author, three evolutionary
tendencies: the success of highly recognizable stores, the increase of travel retail
whose emblem are the Factory Outlet Centres, modern theme-parks where games
are substituted by shopping and the multi-channel retailing, a strategy adopted by
many fashion brands merging different options of traditional and online commerce.
Pedronis aim is to think about the cultural evolution of the relation between
producers and consumers, conceived as writers and readers of a text which is the
shop. The evolution of fashion retail is examined by proposing a three-stage
timeline: (a) the shop as a point of sale (in a Fordist and product-driven market);
(b) the shop as a point of purchase (in a Postfordist and consumer-driven market);
(c) the shop as a point of experience (in the contemporary market driven by
experience and consumption as a part of citizens lifestyles). These points of
experience function as texts that the consumer-reader can read and interpret by
accepting (fully or partially) or refusing the meanings incorporated in the storetext.
Karinna Nobbs, Julie McColl and Linda Shearer focus on a retailing experience
scarcely considered by the other authors of the third section. By stating the
importance of aesthetics as part of the consumption process, the chapter examines
a double object: the visual merchandising and the vintage retail. According to
authors the growing competition in the fashion system and the dynamism of the
fashion retail environment are the main causes of the centrality of brand image.
Brand image passes through the communication occurring in the store and the
visual merchandising, an increasingly important source of competitive advantage
and differentiation. This is yet another element contributing in the semiotic
saturation described by Emanuela Mora.
Marco Pedroni
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Despite the centrality of the visual merchandising, literature on the issue is still
scarce and fragmented. The authors try to fill this vacuum with a conceptual
framework. The vintage fashion retailing is the empirical field where they test this
approach. Their research shows how vintage clothing can be identified as an
enduring trend which has grown from a niche market to a mainstream fashion
phenomenon. Also the vintage retailers, as the other forms of retailing depicted by
Winterhalter and Pedroni, strategically try to position themselves through their
uniqueness transforming the visual merchandising and the in-store experience into
integral parts of the core brand values. As the case of managers concept store, the
personality of the owner influences the overall atmosphere transforming the
purchase in a form of experience.
Emma C. McClendons chapter closes the section and the volume. Expanding
the point of view of precedent chapters, the author states the significance of the
online shop as a cohesive space in which not only the brand develops, but also
where the consumer perceptions and actions are influenced. The chapter focuses on
the American Apparel case and on its business policy sensitive to workers rights
and to immigrant labour. In particular, there is a focus on the Legalize L.A.
campaign with which the Los Angeles brand declared the need for immigration
reform. The campaign, launched at the end of 2007, developed in parallel with the
development of the political campaign for presidential election of 2008, when
Barack Obama was elected president.
American Apparel was supporting an easier procedure to acquire the
citizenship for those immigrants already working in the Unites States, and it began
an action of political awareness campaign directed to its consumers, through
posters and T-shirts. In the ads, the faces of the companys factory workers were
shown: they were literally putting their face to give visibility to immigrants
communities which are supporting the American economy with their work. Two
places became the theatre of this campaign. The traditional store, where the
customer is surrounded by posters and T-shirts of the Legalize L.A. campaign and
the online American Apparel shop. According to McClendon, the latter is a
particularly powerful tool, not only because it amplifies the American Apparel
presence beyond its limited number of shops, but also because the online user cant
escape in any ways the messages of the campaign, which pop up insistently from
homepage, dominating the whole website structure.
Communication and retail become two related moments which express the
brand ambition to be a political actor, a tool for pressure in a battle concerning the
civil rights of a subordinated minority of the society. Breward definition of store as
staging post in the trail of the product from design and manufacture to the intimate
realm of the wearer, 88 recalled by McClendon, thus gains a political and social
meaning applying not only to traditional sale store, but also and above all to online
spaces, recognising a citizen status to the consumer and not as a mere business
marketing target. The double cultural object analysed in the chapter (the online
xxxiv
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shop of American Apparel and the Legalize L.A. campaign) consequently shows
the tight relation with the social world, involved in the debate of immigration
reform and in the campaign for presidential election, addressing not only to
American Apparel consumers but also to public opinion.
In the images 9, 10, 11 and 12, the cultural diamond applied to the chapters of
the third section is represented.
Image 9: The cultural diamond applied to the evolution of fashion stores

(Winterhalter).
Image 10: The cultural diamond applied to fashion stores as texts in the experience
consumption (Pedroni).
Marco Pedroni
xxxv
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Image 11: The cultural diamond applied to vintage fashion stores

(Nobbs, McColl and Shearer).
Image 12: The cultural diamond applied to American Apparels L.A. campaign
(McClendon).
11. Conclusion: The Unbearable Lightness of Fashion
On the contrary of usual habits, this introduction did not simply summarise the
content of the chapters of this book, but it framed them in a conceptual unity of
sociological origin. Very different chapters, both in the scope of the analysis and in
the disciplinary background of their authors, can hence be read as access points to
the study of fashion as an institutionalised system, a social field where different
actors compete for what is at stake. In order to answer the question How does the
field work? there are different useful strategies. We can identify the actors
involved, in production and consumption, and their objectives, and analyse how
xxxvi
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those actors collaborate or compete to reach their goals. We can read fashion as a
cultural system, applying an analytic model as the cultural diamond by Wendy
Griswold that shows the relations between a cultural object, its producers, its
receivers and the cultural world where the product is generated, welcomed and
interpreted. In both cases, we shall consider the relations production and
consumption as complex, reflexive and circular, largely depending on contact men
the cultural intermediaries who connect fashion subsystems (production,
design, communication and consumption) among and within them.
Reflecting on the vertexes of the cultural diamond and on the action of cultural
intermediaries means avoiding some interpretational mistakes, and in particular, it
avoids putting too much emphasis on the power of creators or on objects, as well as
an overestimation of consumer as a reflexive and responsible actor, or an
idealization of the social world as a reality which is independent from the interests
of producers and lites.
Nevertheless, I believe that a model proves its efficacy not in classifying
reality, but showing us the limits of our perspective and indicating an agenda for
future research actions.
I will try to list those themes that, among others, need an in-depth analysis.
The return to materiality, evoked by Emanuela Mora, could be a useful
perspective in the study of fashion communication if it is true that the surplus of
messages focused on the equation between brand and exclusivity has saturated the
receiving capacity of the consumer, who is beginning to demand today for products
able to tell stories instead for brands who spread images. Consequently, the
consumer research can look with a greater interest to sustainable fashion
consumers innovative but today still a minority.
Also the production world should be analysed not only from an immaterial
point of view (brands as producers of values and collective imagery) or a mere
organizational one (the transformations occurred in the supply chain, the fast
fashion revolution), but also considering the manufacture material condition of the
textile industry and its workers biographies a theme McClendon shows talking
about the American Apparel policy, for example. This aspect should be analysed
putting in brackets the Western-centric perspective of the enthusiastic consumer of
values related to the brand and acquiring the point of view of world industries
where fashion is materially produced, in order to introduce with more emphasis in
fashion studies the theme of ethics and social costs in fashion.
If immateriality is light, materiality is heavy. Neither producers nor consumers
want to give up the pleasant and apparent superficiality of fashion games. Fashion
however became a mature cultural industry, it became means of establishing
power relations, reaffirming hierarchical structures, articulating gendered habits,
and asserting ethnic and cultural distinctiveness 89: we have to recognise that the
meanings of this global industry of imagery are so light that they became heavy.
Marco Pedroni
xxxvii
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Notes
1
Paul M. Hirsch, Processing Fads and Fashions: An Organization-Set Analysis of

Culture Industry Systems, American Journal of Sociology 77 (1972): 639-659.
2
Wendy Griswold, Cultures and Society in a Changing World (Thousand Oaks:
Pine Forge Press, 1994).
3
Gilles Lipovetsky, The Empire of Fashion (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1994), 3.
4
Lucia Ruggerone, ed., Al di l della moda. Oggetti, storie, significati (Milan:
Franco Angeli, 2001), 13.
5
Lars Svendsen, Fashion: A Philosophy (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), 17.
6
See John C. Flgel, The Psychology of Clothes (London: Hogarth Press, 1930);
Herbert Blumer, Fashion: From Class Differentiation to Collective Selection, The
Sociological Quarterly X (1969), 275-291; Lipovetsky, The Empire of Fashion.
7
Blumer, Fashion, 275.
8
Lipovetsky, The Empire of Fashion, 4.
9
Pierre Bourdieu and Loic J.D. Waquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 220.
10
Diana Crane, Fashion and its Social Agenda (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 2000).
11
Bonnie English, A Cultural History of Fashion in the 20th Century: From the
Catwalk to the Sidewalk (Oxford, New York: Berg, 2007), 1.
12
See Jennifer Craik, Fashion: The Key Concepts (Oxford, New York: Berg,
2009), 2-5; Tim Edwards, Fashion in Focus: Concepts, Practices and Politics
(London: Routledge, 2011), 2-4; Yuniya Kawamura, Fashion-ology: An
Introduction to Fashion Studies (Oxford/New York: Berg, 2005), 3-6; Svendsen,
Fashion: A Philosophy, 9-20.
13
Elisabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 3.
14
Anne Hollander, Seeing through Clothes (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London:
University of California Press, 1993), 350.
15
William G. Sumner, Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of
Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores and Morals (Boston: Ginn and Company,
1940).
16
Paolo Volont, ed., La creativit diffusa. Culture e mestieri della moda oggi
(Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2003), 33.
17
Blumer, Fashion, 275-276.
18
Ibid., 277.
19
Roland Barthes, The Fashion System (Berkeley, Los Angeles: The University of
California Press, 1990).
xxxviii
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20
Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Carbondale and

Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Press, 1978), 148.
21
Svendsen, Fashion: A Philosophy, 13.
22
Ibid., 14.
23
Volont, La creativit diffusa, 39.
24
Elisabeth Rouse, Understanding Fashion (Oxford: Blackwell Science, 1999).
25
I am referring to the analytic scheme of Marco Pedroni and Paolo Volont, eds.,
Moda e arte (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2012).
26
Bourdieu and Wacquant, Invitation to Sociology, 94-114.
27
In his prolific scientific production, Bourdieu has applied the notion of field to
diverse areas of human activity, including fashion. Pierre Bourdieu and Yvette
Delsaut, Le couturier et sa griffe: contribution une thorie de la magie, Actes de
la recherche en sciences sociales 1 (1975), 7-36.
28
Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1991), 229-231.
29
See for example Blumer, Fashion; Craik, Fashion: The Key Concepts; Fred
Davis, Fashion, Culture, and Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1992); Kawamura, Fashion-ology; Grant McCracken, The Culture and
Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of the Consumer Goods
and Activities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).
30
Kawamura, Fashion-ology, 43.
31
Ibid., 39.
32
Ibid., 51.
33
McCracken, The Culture and Consumption.
34
See Griswold, Culture and Society, 14-17. The name diamond has been chosen
by Griswold referring to the shape of the baseball field.
35
Griswold, Culture and Society, 19; Emanuela Mora, ed., Gli attrezzi per vivere.
Forme della produzione culturale tra industria e vita quotidiana (Milan:
Vita&Pensiero, 2005), VII.
36
Griswold, Culture and Society, 11.
37
Ibid., 11.
38
Ibid., 12.
39
40
In order to fully understand the cultural diamond, we need to untie the creator
from the charismatic ideology of creation (in case of fashion: the myth of
couturier-artist, as individual creator), a disease that according to Bourdieu afflicts
the fields of cultural production and that directs the gaze towards the apparent
producer painter, composer, writer and prevents us from asking who has
created this creator and the magic power of transubstantiation with which the
Marco Pedroni
xxxix
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creator is endowed. Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of
the Literary Field (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), 167.
41
42
Ibid., 66-67.
43
Hirsch, Processing Fads and Fashion; Griswold, Culture and Society.
44
In particular Hirsch refers to three mass cultural products: books, recordings, and
motion pictures. Hirsch, Processing Fads and Fashion.
45
In doing this, I follow a theoretical approach used by scholars of the Center for
the study of fashion and cultural production in the Universit Cattolica of Milan
(Italy). See for example the works of Lucia Ruggerone, Al di l della moda; and
Emanuela Mora, I mestieri della moda tra produzione in serie e creativit, in
Saperi e mestieri dellindustria culturale, eds. Laura Bovone and Emanuela Mora
(Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2003): 69-97.
46
47
Hirsch, Processing Fads and Fashion, 650.
48
Paul du Gay, Stuart Hall, Linda Jones, Hugh Mackay and Keith Negus, Doing
Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman (London: Sage, 1997).
49
Sharon Zukin and Jennifer Maguire, Consumers and Consumption, Annual
Review of Sociology 30 (2005): 180.
50
Joanne Entwistle, The Fashioned Body (Malden: Polity Press/Blackwell, 2000),
235.
51
Craik, Fashion: The Key Concepts, 206.
52
Edgar Morin, Lesprit du temps. Essai sur la culture de masse (Paris: Grasset,
1962).
53
Justin OConnor, The Definition of the Cultural Industries, The European
Journal of Arts Education 2 (2000): 15-27.
54
Emanuela Mora, Fare moda. Esperienze di produzione e consumo (Milan:
FrancoAngeli, 2009), 8.
55
Ibid., 11.
56
Ruggerone, Al di l della moda, 15-31.
57
Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in The MarxEngels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1972), 52-103.
58
Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects (New York, London: Verso, 2005); Jean
Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (London: Sage, 1998);
Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (Candor:
Telos Press, 1981).
59
See for example Mike Featherstone, Consumer culture and postmodernism
(London: Sage Publications, 1991).
60
Torstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Viking, 1959).
xl
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61
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984).
62
Edwards, Fashion in Focus.
63
Zukin and Maguire, Consumer and Consumption, 173; Michael R. Solomon
and Nancy J. Rabolt, Consumer Behavior in Fashion (Upper Saddle River:
Prentice Hall, 2004), 23.
64
The debate on the relation between fashion and identity is obviously highly
articulated and it still needs a precise answer to the following question: Does
fashion communicate, mask or reveal the self or merely construct it as a passing
artifice? Edwards, Fashion in Focus, 28.
65
Georg Simmel, Fashion, The American Journal of Sociology LXII, 6 (1957):
541-557.
66
Bourdieu, Distinction, 367.
67
Zukin and Maguire, Consumers and Consumption, 193.
68
Volont, La creativit diffusa.
69
70
Ibid., 359.
71
Scott Lash and John Urry, The End of Organised Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1987).
72
Sean Nixon and Paul Du Gay, Who Needs Cultural Intermediaries?, Cultural
Studies 16 (2002): 497.
73
Ibid., 496.
74
Bourdieu, Distinction, 153-154.
75
The whole Distinction by Bourdieu is characterised by the use of taste as a social
weapon, a tool for social classification of consumptions in a hierarchical scale,
determining which of them are legitimated in a certain moment and which are not,
which are socially accepted and which are not.
76
77
Keith Negus, The Work of Cultural Intermediaries and the Enduring Distance
between Production and Consumption, Cultural Studies 16 (2002): 504.
78
Lash and Urry, End of Organized Capitalism.
79
The Bourdieus category is widely used in sociology; it has often been used, in a
generic way, to define workers involved in the production and circulation of
symbolic forms; an interpretation based on the idea of symbolic production as a
commodification process of objects, through the creation of bounds between the
latter on one side and values or life styles form the other. See Featherstone,
Consumer Culture and Postmodernism; Negus, The Work of Cultural
Intermediaries; Justin OConnor and Derek Wynne, eds., From the Margins to the
Centre: Cultural Production and Consumption in the Post-Industrial City (Arena,
Ashgate: Aldershot, 1996). For a critique to this generic use of the cultural
Marco Pedroni
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intermediaries category, see David Hesmondhalgh, Bourdieu, the Media and
Cultural Production, Media Culture Society 28 (2006): 211-231. Keith Negus, for
example, described cultural intermediaries as employees engaged in intermediary
activity knowledge workers, those working with information and symbols.
[They] tend to be accorded an active, self-conscious, reflexive and creative role in
their particular activities [...] The aim of numerous workers engaged in promotion
and marketing is to link a product to a potential consumer by seeking to forge a
sense of identification, whether between a young person and a training shoe, a
spectator and a film star, or a listener and a musician. Negus, The work of
cultural intermediaries, 508-509. In fashion studies field, a direct application of
cultural intermediaries can be found in Lise Skov works on young designers in
Hong Kong, in Angela McRobbie on fashion buyers and in Nicoletta Giusti on
fashion designers. See Lisa Skov, Dreams of Small Nations in a Polycentric
Fashion World, Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture 15
(2011): 137-156; Angela McRobbie, British Fashion Design: Rag Trade or Image
Industry? (London: Routledge, 1998); Angela McRobbie, Fashion Buyers:
Cultural intermediaries, European Retail Digest, September 22 (2005): 11-13;
Nicoletta Giusti, Il designer di moda, man-in-the-middle e intermediario
culturale, Rassegna Italiana di Sociologia 4 (2009): 579-607.
80
Nixon and Du Gay, Who Needs Cultural Intermediaries?, 498.
81
Ibid., 503.
82
Laura Bovone, ed., Creare comunicazione. I nuovi intermediari di cultura a
Milano (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1994).
83
Skov, Dreams of Small Nations, 137-156.
84
Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, Notes on Metamodernism,
Journal of Aesthetics and Culture 2 (2010), Viewed 15 September 2012,
http://www.aestheticsandculture.net/index.php/jac/article/view/5677/6304.
85
Jean Franois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1984).
86
Diana Crane, Diffusion Models and Fashion: A Reassessment, Annals of the
American Academy of Political and Social Science 566 (1999): 13-24.
87
With the term post-modern born in the architectural field and then moved in
social sciences we usually refer to a particular phase in the evolution of western
societies, summarily identified with the last two decades of the 20th century, when
the modern ideals of rationality and progress are questioned and the end of grand
narratives is declared, which means the patterns of thought which, from religion to
Marxism, accompanied human being in his research for truth in the last centuries.
Basically, post-modern theories acknowledge the establishment of cultural
relativism and the centrality of the consumption culture. This is not the place to
debate of post-modernism, but we should at least mention that the term is not
xlii
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universally accepted in social sciences, where it has been always harshly
condemned as a synonymous of intellectual surrender to the relativism and as a
reduction of science to a narration as the others. For the use of post-modern in
architecture, see Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (New
York: Pantheon: 1977).
88
Christopher Breward, Fashion (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press,
2003), 143.
89
Craik, Fashion: The Key Concepts, 284.
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Marco Pedroni
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Marco Pedroni is a sociologist of culture. He is currently Research Fellow at the
University of Bergamo (Italy) and teaches Theories of Communication and
Sociology at the Politecnico of Milan and Research Methods at the Milano Fashion
Institute. Marco has a PhD in Sociology and Social Research Methodology from
the Universit Cattolica of Milan, where he collaborates with the Centre for the
Study of Fashion and Cultural Production (Department of Sociology). He has
published articles on cultural industries such as fashion and gambling, social theory
and methodology of research. Among his books, Coolhunting (Milan:
FrancoAngeli, 2010) and Moda e arte (Fashion and Art; Milan: FrancoAngeli,
2012).
Acknowledgements
I would first like to thank those from Inter-Disciplinary.Net for having made this
book possible: Jacque Lynn Foltyn for her support and her role in the exciting
editions of the Global Conference on Fashion; Rob Fisher, founder and enthusiastic
leader of Inter-Disciplinary.Net; Lisa Howard and Daniel Riha for their support
and editorial expertise.
I would like to acknowledge the authors of the chapters for giving their
contribution to this volume with an actual attitude towards collaboration and
exchange of ideas. I am also grateful to Luca Losicco, Sofia Pantouvaki, Flavia
Loscialpo, Mario J. Roman, Wessie Ling, Andrew Markham, Orna Ben-Meir and
all the fashion scholars I met over the past years at the Conferences on Fashion. I
am also indebted to the colleagues from ModaCult, Universit Cattolica of Milan,
for providing me a challenging environment of study and research. A special
thanks to Giulia Airaghi and Gerard Marini.
Most importantly, thanks to my family for encouraging me during sleepless nights
and restless weeks. As any academic knows, they are the hidden contributors to
every scientific book or article. When the race becomes hard to run, they never
stop pulling for you to be the winning horse.

From Production To Consumption - The Culture Industry of Fashion

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A Critical Issues research and publications project.

From Production to Consumption:

Inter-Disciplinary Press 2013

The Inter-Disciplinary Press is part of Inter-Disciplinary.Net a global network

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

Inter-Disciplinary Press, Priory House, 149B Wroslyn Road, Freeland,

Designing and Producing Fashion

Everyone Deserves to Dress Well: Democratization of

The Invisible Presence of the Internalised Corset:

Pandora in the Box: Travelling around the World in the

What is Special in the Collections? Fashion Brands and

Sellers of Experience: The New Face of Fashion Retail and

An Exploratory Study into the Strategic Significance of

The Political Power of the Online Shop: American Apparels

The Crossroad between Production and Consumption:

The Crossroad between Production and Consumption

The Crossroad between Production and Consumption

The Crossroad between Production and Consumption

Image 1: The cultural diamond (source: Wendy Griswold) 39

The Crossroad between Production and Consumption

Image 2: The culture industry system and the cultural diamond

The Crossroad between Production and Consumption

The Crossroad between Production and Consumption

The Crossroad between Production and Consumption

The Crossroad between Production and Consumption

The Crossroad between Production and Consumption

The Crossroad between Production and Consumption

Image 3: The cultural diamond applied to the knock-on design practice

Image 4: The cultural diamond applied to Turkish fast fashion (Kireci).

Image 5: The cultural diamond applied to Marlies Dekkers lingerie (Bruggeman).

The Crossroad between Production and Consumption

The Crossroad between Production and Consumption

Image 6: The cultural diamond applied to the meta-modernist practices of fashion

Image 7: The cultural diamond applied to Pandora doll (Taylor).

Image 8: The cultural diamond applied to semiotic saturation (Mora).

The Crossroad between Production and Consumption

The Crossroad between Production and Consumption

Image 9: The cultural diamond applied to the evolution of fashion stores

Image 11: The cultural diamond applied to vintage fashion stores

The Crossroad between Production and Consumption

Paul M. Hirsch, Processing Fads and Fashions: An Organization-Set Analysis of

The Crossroad between Production and Consumption

Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Carbondale and

The Crossroad between Production and Consumption

Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste

The Crossroad between Production and Consumption

The Crossroad between Production and Consumption

The Crossroad between Production and Consumption

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