From Production to Consumption: The Cultural Industry of Fashion

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 22-25 September 2011. The chapters here published 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, analyzing 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 analyzing 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 publication 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.