The Aesthetic Economy of Fashion by Joanne Entwistle

Author:Joanne Entwistle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berg
Published: 2009-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

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Markets in Motion: Fashion Temporality and Materiality

Fashion buyers at Selfridges draw on a wide-ranging knowledge. Their knowledge is, of course, partly economic, but making sense in this market requires assembling a vast range of elements; knowledge of past, present and future tastes; previous and emerging cultural trends in music, art, film, lifestyle; shopping habits and retailing trends; imagined customer body shapes, psychologies and preferences; the strategies of competitors, as well as the impact of environment, like the weather, upon shopping habits. These various knowledges are intricately tied together in a seamless web as part of the analysis and calculations of fashionable clothing, so that discussions of weekly sales at a meeting which examines merchandising statistics might include discussion on how the wet weather is ‘dampening’ spending, the comments of one particular customer to the shop floor staff, a buyer’s mother-in-law’s feelings about the particular designer brands on offer for older customers in the store, the skilful way in which customers try to circumvent the Selfridges policy on returns, bringing back clothes already worn (a problem in evening wear especially) and the ineffective or poorly marked shop floor signage.

Thus, buying is a complex process, a ‘network of materially heterogeneous elements’ (Law and Hetherington 2000: 37). I want to describe these elements by delineating some of the routine activities and processes of the Buying Office. Understanding this ‘material heterogeneity’ (see also Law 2002) involves looking at the different tools and devices used to ‘see’ and calculate fashion. Likewise, ‘following the actors’ (Latour 1987) involved in seeing fashion means following them around the spaces of their everyday working life, examining how the Buying Office itself is put together and investigating the tools of calculation themselves, including spreadsheets, statistics and plans produced by the Finance Department, promotional material, trend forecasting and sales meetings. These various tools, devices and practices are the materials through which knowledge of markets is assembled in all its diversity: ‘For STS [science and technology studies] analysis, the relations that produce knowing locations, information, are endless. We’re saying, then, that knowing is a relational “effect” ’ (Law and Hetherington 2000: 38). I suggest that knowledge is distributed across a range of materials and locations, with fashion buyers important nodes in the knowledge flow. We begin our tour by first looking at the way in which space is organized within the Buying Office. My analysis then focuses upon three particular strategies for organizing knowledge at Selfridges—the Fashion Office, routine ‘floor walks’ and the financial plan—all of which are used, in different ways, to make sense, calculate and evaluate women’s wear fashion.

This ANT approach challenges some of the conventional wisdom concerning knowledge within business, management and ‘knowledge transfer’ literature, which defines it in terms of fixed properties and locations. This chapter is divided into two sections. In Defining Economic Knowledge, I challenge some conventional definitions of economic knowledge that assume it to have definite properties of ‘rationality and cognition’ and certain stable locations in ‘research and design’ departments—for example often located within ‘knowledge-intensive’ firms and sectors, such as science, engineering or chemical based.

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