Fashion-ology by Yuniya Kawamura

Author:Yuniya Kawamura
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Berg Publishers
Published: 2004-11-30T16:00:00+00:00

Designers, Creativity and Social Structure

Actors in the system have shared values to achieve their specific goals. Each participant has individual goals that are met by participation in the system, plays a specific part in the overall system and gets benefits from that participation. The making of designers is not a responsibility of one individual but of a collective activity. One can look at fashion organizations and the fashion system in relation to the people whose collective actions construct the fashion system because there is always a correlation between social structures and the actions of people working collectively. These cooperative networks make fashion happen. All parts, each with specific latent and manifest functions within the institution, are interdependent. None of them is indispensable in the production of fashion. Thus institutions and creators belong to the system that contributed in making Paris the fashion capital. A small number of people in any organization can hold authority. The elites who are in control generally share a common culture, and they mobilize formally and informally in the sense that they act together to defend their position, and use it to their own individual as well as institutional advantage. It is they who act as gatekeepers and construct the legitimate standard of aesthetics of appearance by taking advantage of Paris as their symbolic capital.

While talents and creativity alone are invoked to explain the success and the fame of a fashion designer, understanding the structure of the fashion system is essential to gaining the official designer status. The concept of creativity in fashion is elusive as for any artistic activity, but it is generally, and correctly, assumed that the making of fashion requires special skills. The majority of fashion professionals who have the authority to name creative designers point to their innovativeness and innate talent. Although it is not inaccurate to say that these designers are gifted, these gifts alone do not give the status that the world acknowledges. Every individual has an urge to create something and possesses the seed for creativity, but external forces are required to legitimate that act or the end product as ‘creative.’ The conception of creativity needs to be questioned. Examining the institutional factors in the social process of the making of a designer will provide some answers to this vexed question.

I am in opposition to the conventional notion that any great art will eventually be recognized because great creators with exceptional talents produce art works with universal aesthetic qualities that are part of universal human cultural values. This theory does not take into consideration the social processes and environment in which creators take part. Since 1970 Japanese designers have enjoyed high reputations in Paris, and no history of fashion in Paris is complete without them. As indicated in my empirical research (Kawamura 2004), it was not only their creativity that made them famous and sent them to Paris. If designers’ talent can directly correlate with the prestige and success, these designers could have remained in Japan; wherever they were, according to the conventional view, they would have been discovered by fashion legitimators.

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