From Production to Consumption

Series Editors

Dr Robert Fisher Lisa Howard Dr Ken Monteith Dr Daniel Riha

Advisory Board

James Arvanitakis Mira Crouch Simon Bacon Stephen Morris Kasia Bronk John Parry Jo Chipperfield Karl Spracklen Ann-Marie Cook Peter Twohig Phil Fitzsimmons S Ram Vemuri Peter Mario Kreuter Kenneth Wilson

A Critical Issues research and publications project. http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/critical-issues/

The Ethos Hub ‘Fashion’

2013

Critical Issues

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/ The Inter-Disciplinary Press is part of Inter-Disciplinary.Net – a global network for research and publishing. The Inter-Disciplinary Press aims to promote and encourage the kind of work which is collaborative, innovative, imaginative, and which provides an exemplar for inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission of Inter-Disciplinary Press. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Inter-Disciplinary Press, Priory House, 149B Wroslyn Road, Freeland, Oxfordshire. OX29 8HR, United Kingdom. +44 (0)1993 882087 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: vii 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 3 Australian Mass Market Fashion Design Practice Alice Payne ‘Everyone Deserves to Dress Well’: Democratization of 21 Fashion in Turkey and the Case of LC Waikiki Ayşe Nil Kireçci The Invisible Presence of the Internalised Corset: 37 Post-Feminist Values Materialised in Marlies Dekkers’ Lingerie Daniëlle Bruggeman Part 2 Communicating Fashion Meta-Modernism in Fashion and Style Practice: Authorship 59 and the Consumer Julianne Pederson Pandora in the Box: Travelling around the World in the 75 Name of Fashion Lydia Maria Taylor What is Special in the Collections? Fashion Brands and 93 Semiotic Saturation Emanuela Mora Part 3 Consuming Fashion The Evolution of the Retail Space from Luxury Malls to 111 Guerrilla Stores: Tracing the Change of Fashion Cecilia Winterhalter Sellers of Experience: The New Face of Fashion Retail and 133 the Role of Consumers as ‘Store Readers’ Marco Pedroni

An Exploratory Study into the Strategic Significance of 151 Visual Merchandising: The Case of Vintage Fashion Retailing Karinna Nobbs, Julie McColl and Linda Shearer The Political Power of the Online Shop: American Apparel’s 181 Virtual Campaign for Immigration Reform Emma C. McClendon

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 Hirsch1 and Wendy Griswold.2 The former, analysing the media industry, has developed an interpretative model – known as Hirsch’s 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 Griswold’s 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 Hirsch’s 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, Kundera’s 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 ‘Material’s’ 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 Blumer7 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 Lipovetsky’s 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 fashion’s 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 interaction’s 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’ thesis19 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 change’s 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 Kundera’s 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 world27 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 itself32 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 McCracken33 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 meaning’s 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 object’s 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 culture’s system are those concentrated only: (a) on the character of the creator genius, a person of outstanding talent, the only maker of the cultural object’s 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 diamond’s 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 Griswold’s 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 Hirsch’s 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 world’s 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 Walkman48 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 consumer’s 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 self-realization, 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 interaction50 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 Morin52 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 O’Connor,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 Horkheimer’s 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 stores55 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 ‘hype-reality’.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 post-modern theories raise consumption culture as peculiar characteristic of contemporary age,59 a number of theories focused on the consumption practices: starting from Veblen research60 on ‘leisure class’ and goods as status symbols, to Bourdieu’s work61 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 Edwards62 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 non-membership 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 Maguire’s 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 re-adaptation 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 ill-defined 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 Urry71 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 in-between 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

Hirsch’s contact men have similar filter function to that of Bourdieu’s 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 élites’ 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 Hirsch’s 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 production’s 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 Griswold’s 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 Payne’s 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 Hemisphere’s 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 Payne’s 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 Ayşe Nil Kireçci’s 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. Kireçci 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 Payne’s designers and Kireçci’s brand are two diverse examples of the ‘creator’ vertex of the Griswold’s diamond, where we can notice the tight link between production and designing, Daniëlle 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 women’s 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 designer’s 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 Gaultier’s 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 Dekker’s 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 Kireçci 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 Dekker’s 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 (Kireçci).

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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 Pederson’s 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-François Lyotard),85 conscious of the fact that such meta-narrative 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 code’s ink. Here comes the problem for élite – 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 élites. 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 élites 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 Pederson’s 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. There’s 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 ‘à 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, Taylor’s 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 Mora’s 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 diamond’s 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 architect-stars, 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 Garçons, 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 post-modernity87 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 Mora’s chapter that an excess in immateriality can paradoxically lead us to a new desire for materiality.

If Winterhalter’s 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.

Pedroni’s 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 store-text.

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.

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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. McClendon’s 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 company’s 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 can’t 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


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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).

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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 Apparel’s 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


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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 élites.

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.

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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 là 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. Flügel, 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 Volonté, ed., La creatività 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).


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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 Volonté, La creatività diffusa, 39. 24 Elisabeth Rouse, Understanding Fashion (Oxford: Blackwell Science, 1999). 25 I am referring to the analytic scheme of Marco Pedroni and Paolo Volonté, 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 à une théorie 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 Griswold, Culture and Society, 15. 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

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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 Griswold, Culture and Society, 42. 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 Università Cattolica of Milan (Italy). See for example the works of Lucia Ruggerone, Al di là della moda; and Emanuela Mora, ‘I mestieri della moda tra produzione in serie e creatività’, in Saperi e mestieri dell’industria culturale, eds. Laura Bovone and Emanuela Mora (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2003): 69-97. 46 Griswold, Culture and Society, 72. 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, L’esprit du temps. Essai sur la culture de masse (Paris: Grasset, 1962). 53 Justin O’Connor, ‘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 là della moda, 15-31. 57 Karl Marx, ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844’, in The Marx-Engels 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).


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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 Volonté, La creatività diffusa. 69 Bourdieu, Distinction, 151. 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 Bourdieu, Distinction, 370. 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 Bourdieu’s 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 O’Connor 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

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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 François 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


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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 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 Università 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, Università 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

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