The Crossroad between Production and Consumption: An Introduction to Fashion as a Cultural Industry

The chpater explores what transforms fashion into a system by focusing on three levels of analysis: 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.