Fashion culture: creative work, female individualization
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71 fashion culture: creative
work, female individualization Angela McRobbie
abstract This article explores some of the key dynamics of the UK fashion sector as an example of a post-industrial, urban based, cultural economy comprising of a largely youthful female workforce. It argues that the small scale, independent activities which formed the backbone of the success of British fashion design as an internationally recognized phenomenon from the mid 1980s to the mid 1990s, represented a form of female selfgenerated work giving rise to collaborative possibilities and co-operation. However without an effective lobby or association (despite the expansion of the fashion media) and under conditions of rapid individualization and in an increasingly harsh climate of neo-liberalization, this creative economy has been overtaken and virtually demolished by the joint forces of a re-vitalized high street fashion culture and the aggressive presence of corporate fashion (‘Prada-ization’). While the UK government celebrates the growth of the cultural economy, it also overlooks the processes making the livelihoods of its predominantly female workforce either untenable or else requiring de-specialization and ‘multi-tasking’.
keywords fashion culture; female individualization; cultural economy; self generated economic activity; de-specialization; multi-tasking.
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feminist review 71 2002 c 2002 Feminist Review. 0141-7789/02 $15 www.feminist-review.com (52–62)
experimental semi-entrepreneurial creative practice The aim in this short article is to portray some of the contours of the fashion industry across its various sectors in relation to the recent acceleration of social and economic trends which can be summarized in terms of neo-liberalization, individualization, and globalization. It is not my intention, however, to deal with any of these in great depth, but instead to show rather schematically how they register in a fairly specific context and locality. A grounded analysis of London as a fashion centre and a labour market whose workforce is overwhelmingly female offers insight into how a sector that appears to be thriving and is seen as a highly attractive career location for young women in reality is undergoing rapid shifts that have deleterious consequences for this youthful and enthusiastic workforce. These changes are immensely difficult to track partly because fashion, across its component parts, rarely attracts the sustained attention of social scientists. There is a high degree of ‘disconnect’ in this regard, where economists and labour market analysts of trends in clothing and fashion manufacture rarely converse with feminist scholars interested in gender and consumer culture. But this opacity in relation to the fashion industry as a whole is now intensified by changes bound up with the ‘network society’ (Castells, 1996).
1 The disavowal of feminist ideas and a preference for the apolitical (i.e. retraditionalization) in the field of fashion commentary
Specifically, I will consider the nature and consequences o
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