To most people, fashion can daze and confuse. On the one hand, fashion professionals often feel overwhelmed by the pace of change in the industry, as well as by the pressure exerted on them to squeeze a living out of an inherently creative process that is undoubtedly a form of artistic expression.
In a rare interview given to Le Monde Magazine, the celebrated, Tunisian-born, Paris-based fashion designer Azzedine Alaïa complained: “Why do they force fashion designers to produce, produce, produce? Productivity, productivity, budget, productivity. […] Today, the only thing I want is more time to be creative! […]
This is all I want: to do my job as a couturier, but do it well. Otherwise, I’ll leave the field.” This is quite a striking comment made by one of the most influential designers in the world and a remarkable expression of the key tension that exists in fashion between creativity and financial profit.
Fashion consumers, on the other hand, have a hard time figuring out what drives fashion change, and how to make sense of the new styles and designs that are put forward at least twice a year. The mystery surrounding fashion feeds rumors and conspiracy theories that some actors of the industry manipulate the public – fashion magazines, for example.
The desire of the public to know more about who makes fashion, and how it is actually produced, has led to the emergence of extremely informative documentaries like The September Issue (2009, by R. J. Cutler) that describes the day-to-day work of Vogue’s British-born editor, Anna Wintour, or The Day Before (2009, by Loïc Prigent) that gives unprecedented access to the actual making of a fashion collection.
The lack of clarity about what fashion actually is, and the widespread frustration among customers that goes with it, is not new, and is inherently intertwined with fashion itself. To be clear, and slightly contentious, there has been no real willingness so far on the part of fashion professionals to be too explicit about the fashion production process.
After all, fashion is based on the constant replacement of goods (clothes and other artifacts) that do not need to be replaced. The objective of this essay is to clarify what fashion is about, and what its underlying mechanisms are.
This is not the first effort of this kind, but it will attempt something new by extracting the substance of academic work on fashion and confronting it with professionals’ reports on their own practice. In other words, this essay will address the long-standing divide between theories of fashion and fashion as a living social phenomenon outside academia.
“Lifting the veil” on the fashion industry – unveiling it – implies looking at this object historically, not just in passing by making pleasant and entertaining references to historical anecdotes, but by fully engaging the origins of fashion and its evolution. Fashion here and now is specific, but its underlying mechanisms go back a long way.
A striking fact that appears from a review of the academic literature devoted to fashion – whether it is in the fields of cultural studies, economics, history or sociology – is that many authors begin their discussion by lamenting the lack of research on this topic.
They usually explain this by a disregard for fashion on the part of the social-scientific community, who purportedly consider fashion superficial, or the expression of a social manipulation by upper classes and conglomerates that seek to artificially sustain consumption.
Yet, as explained by Italian sociologist Nicoletta Giusti, the 1990s and 2000s have seen the emergence of an interdisciplinary research agenda on the rich and fertile subject of fashion, sometimes collectively referred to as “fashion studies” or, probably more accurately, as “fashion-ology,” a term coined by Japanese sociologist Yuni Kawamura.
Fashionology is thus, first, a place where the various social sciences meet around a common purpose – understanding fashion in a scientific way – and, secondly, an attempt at reconciling the rhythm of fashion, that of permanent renewal, and the rhythm of science, in which facts are analyzed and theories constructed and then tested.
Fashion has struggled to establish itself as a legitimate subject for research because of its complexity and ambiguity. As pointed out by American economist Richard Caves, the creative industries in general (such as music, movies, publishing) and the fashion industry in particular, are characterized by a lack of data.
This lack of data, which comes from the difficulty of measuring creativity, style, and culture in general, is a serious obstacle to the scientific study of fashion and other creative industries. Moreover, the definition of fashion itself is ambiguous. Indeed, fashion can be understood in two ways.
First, it can be defined as the apparel and luxury industries (to which cosmetics may be added) in which multiple actors, such as professionals or firms, develop careers and strategies in order to produce designs and garments that will appeal to customers.
This perspective also includes the consumption patterns of individuals, groups or social classes that use clothes to define their identity. This definition of fashion as an industry largely overlaps with the theme of “adornment,” but is distinct nonetheless.
Adornment includes not only clothes but also their associated ornaments, such as accessories, jewelry, tattoos, makeup, and the like. Thus, it can exist outside of fashion as an industry.
Second, fashion can be defined as a specific type of social change, regular and noncumulative, deployed across multiple domains of social life beyond clothing. Fashion as a type of change is regular because it occurs at constant and often short intervals, for example twice a year in the case of apparel and its spring / summer and fall / winter collections.
It is noncumulative because it does not add new elements to past changes: it replaces them. Thus, change in fashion differs from what happens, for example, in science or technology, and even in the arts, where change is (most of the time) cumulative.
Indeed, as explained by the Austro- British philosopher of science Karl Popper, scientific discoveries do not emerge from an intellectual vacuum, they are built from previous work by integrating solutions to its challenges, as in quantum physics vis-à-vis Newtonian physics.
The American philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn defended a similar idea but in the specific context of what he called “normal science,” where the main assumptions made by scientists are not challenged, and where new scientific discoveries are incremental.
Similarly, a technological innovation always emerges by connecting innovations belonging to previously unconnected social worlds, such as in the case of the light bulb, which was not invented by Thomas Edison alone but by his team of researchers who had tested a large number of ideas and technologies before developing their own invention.
In the arts, an artistic movement is never completely new and is always developed from existing forms, as in the case of rock and roll which was derived from blues and country music. Finally, fashion as a change occurs in many spheres of social life beyond clothing, for example in the attribution of names to newborns by their parents, in the adoption of new ideas in management science, or in the evolution of facial hairstyles in men.
The fashion and luxury industries constitute a major economic activity, although their importance is constantly underestimated. According to market research firm Euromonitor International, consumer expenditures in this sector represent nearly 6 percent of world consumption, all subsectors considered, with US$1,696 billion in 2010 for apparel (clothing and footwear) alone, to which US$339 billion for jewelry, watches etc. can be added.
By comparison, the automotive sector (the purchase of cars, motorcycles, and other vehicles) constitutes just less than 4 percent of global consumption, and communications spending represents only 3 percent. Beyond its importance as a business activity, fashion is also a singular object, at the crossroads of art and commerce.
While biannual fashion shows in New York, London, Milan, or Paris are an opportunity for fashion designers to display their artistic talent to the world, and dazzle their audiences, the fashion houses must handle, on a daily basis, very concrete issues that can have a critical impact on their survival, like deciding prices, determining the location of their factories, defining their distribution channels, or elaborating their advertising campaigns.