Fashion Cultures Revisited

Theories, Explorations and Analysis

Stella Bruzzi, Pamela Church Gibson, Stella Bruzzi, Pamela Church Gibson

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136474729
• Edición: 2
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Ethnic Studies

Following on from the ground-breaking collection Fashion Cultures, this second anthology, Fashion Cultures Revisited, contains 26 newly commissioned chapters exploring fashion culture from the start of the new millennium to the present day. The book is divided into six parts, each discussing different aspects of fashion culture:

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• Shopping, spaces and globalisation
• Changing imagery, changing media
• Altered landscapes, new modes of production
• Icons and their legacies
• Contestation, compliance, feminisms
• Making masculinities

Fashion Cultures Revisited explores every facet of contemporary fashion culture and the associated spheres of photography, magazines and television, and shopping.Consequently it is an ideal companion to those interested in fashion studies, cultural studies, art, film, fashion history, sociology and gender studies.

PART ONE

Shopping, spaces and globalisation

Chapter 1

David Gilbert

A NEW WORLD ORDER?

Fashion and its capitals in the twenty-first century

IN JANUARY 2013, FRANCA SOZZANNI, editor-in-chief at Vogue Italia, visited Dubai to announce the ‘Vogue Fashion Dubai Experience’ at the Dubai Mall, due to take place later that year. Sozzanni took twelve local designers under her wing for a special mentoring session, and declared to the press that ‘three or four of them are very good’ (Al Arabiya News 2013). She added: ‘it is heartening to see designers here not copying the work of others but rather displaying their creativity and tradition. They are authentic.’ Sozzanni promised to help with a mission including ‘some supermodels’ and ‘some of the top designers, like Ricardo Tsici and Karl Lagerfeld’. Outside the world of elite fashion, this kind of patronising orientalism is increasingly rare and anachronistic, but the worldview from Vogue Italia seems relatively untouched either by the work of Edward Said, or by a little reflection on changing world orders in the aftermath of the global economic crisis and collapse of the Italian economy. At the heart of that worldview is an enduring sense of certain places as centres of fashion, as places from that style emanates and is spread to the rest of the world. In her comments Sozzanni reached for one of the oldest and strongest expressions of that relationship between fashion and geography: ‘Dubai has the potential but is not regarded as a fashion capital in the world.’

On Planet Condé Nast, there doesn’t seem to be much evidence of the wider changes that have taken place within the global economy and geopolitical world order of the early twenty-first century. To be sure, there are now twenty-one national editions of Vogue that include editions for Russia, India, China, South Korea, Thailand and Ukraine. However, the content of these magazines (and associated new media) fits a pretty consistent pattern of a focus on local designers, shops and events, mixed with constant reference back to the established centres of fashion’s world order. It’s not just in Vogue, however, that this sense of a global geography of fashion is expressed. Each year Global Language Monitor, a media-analytics company based in Austin, Texas publishes a ranking of ‘global fashion capitals’, based on analysis of the internet, blogosphere, the top 250,000 print and electronic news media, as well as new social media sources including Twitter. The cities are tracked in relation to their frequency, contextual usage and appearance in global media outlets. London retained its position at the top of the list for 2012, buoyed up by references to the Olympics and Kate Middleton, but the record of the index shows the continuing primacy of London, New York, Milan and Paris (Global Language Monitor 2013).¹ Some cities move up or down the charts in a kind of urban fashion cycle, associated with short-term trends and events, while those four cities retain their place near the top. An indication of the power of cities in the imagination of fashion is also shown by the word ‘London’ being Global Language Monitor’s top fashion buzzword for 2013, taking its place as the key trending word in fashion’s discourse ahead of ‘high slits’, ‘textures’ and ‘nail art’ (Global Language Monitor 2013).

It’s easy to suggest that something like the Global Language Monitor index is measuring little more than noise and gossip, but perhaps that’s just the point. The idea of the fashion capital has long been about more than statistics for the volume of fashion production or the size of the design sector in a particular city. There’s a familiar mantra of a very few city names that are regularly incanted in the advertising of high fashion, after the name of a designer or brand, or etched into the glass of a shop window. In some cases the name of the fashion capital is incorporated into a brand name itself, perhaps most famously in the case of DKNY – Donna Karan New York. The list of cities is an almost transparent sign, only noticed when disrupted. In 2004 as part of an advertising campaign to market itself as ‘the Fashion Capital’ for the Melbourne metropolitan area, a suburban mall covered the city’s billboards, trams and buses with the slogan ‘New York, Paris, London, Rome, Chadstone’. Writing recently on the hierarchy of fashion cities, sociologist Lise Skov somewhat bizarrely compares fashion’s cities to the geopolitical ordering of the UN, suggesting that London, Paris, New York, Milan and perhaps Tokyo are the equivalents of the permanent members of fashion’s Security Council, but that there is effectively a rotating ‘sixth seat’ representing what is possible for other cities and smaller nations in a ‘polycentric fashion world’ (Skov 2011). This chapter has its focus on what Skov terms the ‘top tier’ or perhaps the seemingly permanent members of fashion’s security council, its world cities, but sees this ordering neither as a given, nor necessarily as a permanent fixture. The first section relates the idea of fashion capitals to the wider literature on global or world cities. The following section reiterates arguments made in the first edition of Fashion Cultures about the historical development of a world ordering of fashion centres, connecting these developments to wider shifts in economic, political and cultural power (Gilbert 2000; see particularly Gilbert 2006a and other essays in Breward and Gilbert 2006 for further discussion of the idea of the Fashion World City). The final section considers the changing urban hierarchy of fashion’s centres in the twenty-first century, and particularly the hollowing-out of its capitals, and the potential emergence of new sites of creativity.

Fashion capitals as world cities

The notion of a fashion capital, or a ‘fashion world city’ seems ubiquitous, yet hard to pin down directly. If we consider the longest-running of fashion’s claimed capitals, we see just what complexity is to be found in this construction. The concept of ‘Paris fashion’ is one of the most powerful and long-running reifications of place. The routine description of the city over the past 200 years as the ‘capital’ of world fashion disguises the ways in which different aspects of the city’s relationship with fashion contribute to this understanding. A dominant representation of Paris has emphasised the clustering of elite designers, the structure of the couture system, and the power of the Paris fashion industry to direct fashion styles far beyond the limits of the city. However, Paris’s role as fashion capital has also been related to its industrial structure, particularly to the long-term survival of a production sector of specialist workshops and individual craft workers, concentrated in the Sentier district of the city. As Nancy Green suggested in her superb comparative study of Paris and New York, both cities had ‘flexible specialisation before the term was coined’ (1997: 4). Elaborate contracting and subcontracting systems in the apparel industries has been a vital element in sustaining a rapid turnover and adaptation of styles. At other times, Paris has been interpreted as a world centre of fashion because of its distinctive metropolitan cultures of consumption, both in the narrow sense of shops and shopping, and in a broader sense of the practices associated with the wearing of fashionable dress in the spaces of the city. Paris has also had a long history of representation, particularly in the fashion press, as the first city in an almost free-floating symbolic order of fashionability (Rocamora 2006). There has been something approaching a naturalisation of Paris’s relationship with fashion, often around the elevation of a certain construction of fashionable femininity to a symbol of Parisian superiority.

The idea of a fashion world city also necessarily involves the relationships between places, both between imagined or actual centres of influence and ‘peripheral’ places in the geography of fashion, but also tellingly between different fashion centres. We need to pay attention to what might be described as the historical geography of fashion’s world cities – the processes by which some cities become identified as central sites of global significance in fashion culture, and the competition and interconnections between those cities. The focus is on the fashion capital both as a changing historical formation, and relationally as a form of urban ordering or hierarchy. Approaching fashion’s world cities from a perspective that emphasises their position within wider structures of economic and political power draws us towards the tradition in urban studies that has focused on ‘world cities’ or ‘global cities’. In 1986, John Friedmann put forward what he described as ‘the world city hypothesis’ (see Friedmann and Wolff 1982 for an earlier version of these ideas). Friedmann’s ideas were less a formal hypothesis than an agenda for research concerning the relationship of cities to the development of the world economy. Friedmann argued that increasing economic globalisation had shifted the balance between major cities’ roles as centres of territorially bounded political states and as sites for the management of global capital.

In Friedmann’s analysis, the decisive variable in explaining the nature of key ‘world cities’ was ‘the mode of their integration with the global economy’ over and above ‘their own historical past, national policies, and cultural influences’ (1986: 69). This claim had several consequences for the analysis of cities. First, he suggested that structural changes in the economies of such world cities (and consequent changes in their physical forms, social composition and urban cultures) were dependent on the form and extent of their integration into the world economy. Second, Friedmann argued that it was necessary to understand cities as part of a world system, thus emphasising not only the significance of connections and interdependencies between major cities, but also their positions within a structured hierarchy of cities.

Friedmann paid particular attention to those cities at the very top of his hierarchy, what he described as ‘primary core cities’. In the mid-1980s he suggested that these were London, Paris, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Tokyo. Here there is significant overlap with what Saskia Sassen later described as ‘global cities’ (1991; 2001). In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries these cities developed intense concentrations of ‘advanced producer services’, typically in sectors such as banking, accountancy, advertising, insurance, commercial law and management consultancy, while experiencing a parallel process of deindustrialisation of more traditional urban activities. Sassen argues that financial deregulation and the development of new forms of telecommunications, media and information technology, far from dispersing economic activities as some predicted, created an aggressive new logic for their concentration of these activities in a few great cities. Sassen further argued that the global cities, particularly London and New York, are marked by increasing economic and social polarisation. Alongside the development of advanced producer services has been a parallel development of a low-paid service sector, often characterised by a casualised labour force with a high proportion of immigrants. In Sassen’s account of the distinctive characteristics of the global city, fashion appears only in the guise of the sweatshops of the garment industry.

One response to this emphasis on ‘world cities’ and ‘global cities’ has focused on the significance of urban hierarchies, and has attempted to produce different taxonomic strategies for ordering and categorising cities. At its worst this work has descended into a fixation with league tables and debates about the best way to measure the ranking of a world city. Beyond consideration of the location of the corporate headquarters of fashion and luxury goods conglomerates such as LVMH (Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy), fashion has rarely been factored into such urban ranking schemes. These have been dominated by analyses of advanced producer services, which have been used to measure the ‘global capacity’ of various cities. Following Friedmann’s original arguments such advanced producer services (and financial services in particular) are seen as the primary driving forces of the global urban order.

There is clearly a significant overlap between the cities routinely described as world fashion cities, and those identified by Friedmann, Sassen and their followers as primary world cities or global cities. Given, in Friedmann’s terminology, the embeddedness of a ‘transnational capitalist class’ whose ‘ideology is consumerist’ in such world cities, and given fashion’s inherent elitism and consumerism, it would be very surprising if this were not the case (Friedmann 1995: 26). The emergence of New York as a world city of fashion in the early twentieth century, or Tokyo’s rise as an international fashion centre in the late 1970s and 1980s were not unrelated to the position of those cities in rising economic super-powers. However, the major centres of world fashion cannot be simply read off from a list of the main world business centres. For example, within Western Europe, Frankfurt and Milan can be taken as contrasting examples. While the financial centre of Frankfurt has a range of elite designer stores, catering for an affluent, international population, it hardly registers in the wider symbolic or economic geographies of fashion. By contrast, Milan, although certainly one of the most significant business command and control centres in the European Union, has been regarded since the 1970s as one of fashion’s four or five front-rank world centres (see Segre Reinach 2006). Viewed historically, there are also significant discontinuities between the development of fashion’s ordering of world centres and the urban geographies of global finance, demonstrated most clearly in Paris’s long history as the claimed centre of the world fashion industry, despite the vicissitudes of the French economy and catastrophic interruptions by war. The argument here is not that analysis of fashion culture’s fixation with urban orderings and world centres can produce a more accurate overall metric of the global significance of certain cities. There are, however, a number of potential insights that can come from bringing the perspectives of the world cities literature together with consideration of the geographies of fashion.

The best work on world cities addresses not just the position of cities in a rank-order, but also analyses the nature of connections between cities, and the institutions and processes that work to include, exclude and position cities in the hierarchy (Taylor 2004). Recent work has involved mapping the inter-city structures of multinational corporations or the contractual networks of firms in different sectors. Clearly one task for research into the geographies of fashion is to map these kinds of connection. This work has also emphasised the way that even in a world with massive capacity for instantaneous long-distance communication and financial transfer, the relationship between cities is shaped by very basic constraints of time and space. The most common example given is the way that 24-hour trading of shares, currency and commodities has strengthened the position of primary financial markets in different time-...