Walking Mannequins by Misra Joya;Walters Kyla;

Author:Misra, Joya;Walters, Kyla;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 6826264
Publisher: University of California Press

BEAUTY AND THE BRAND: UNDERSTANDING THE AESTHETIC LABOR PROCESS

Aesthetic labor is especially prevalent in stores targeting tweens, teenagers, and “college kids.”6 These retailers implement labor practices that use workers as models for the store’s signature “look.” They hire people seen as visually “fit” to represent the brand and mold them constantly, treating them as walking mannequins.7 Sociologist Ashley Mears explains that through this labor process, “service employees become part of the products being sold.”8 Thus, when it comes to “onboarding” new employees, appearance is more important than experience and qualifications.9 In this chapter, we explore how managers use workers as in-store models.

As part of the service panopticon, company appearance policies encourage store managers to hire based on very specific criteria related to “attractiveness” and constantly monitor workers’ bodies. To keep their jobs, workers also learn to manage their appearance, thanks to regular interactions with their managers about their looks. Corporate policies largely appear to reproduce a particular classed, racial, gendered, and sexualized beauty aesthetic found in mainstream society and popular culture.10 Beauty, which is socially constructed, is a form of symbolic capital; workers’ bodies help signal their status.11 Hiring workers who fit socially constructed beauty ideals allows these fashion stores to tap into some of that symbolic capital for their brand. Clothing retailers seem to believe that maintaining a cadre of “gorgeous” staffers attracts impressionable customers.

The clothing retail industry’s focus on beauty imposes body rules as another dimension of aesthetic labor.12 Sociologist Eileen Otis conceptualizes “body rules” as “the expectations for bodily presentation and displays . . . shaped by historical and cultural norms of behavior for categories of identity including sex, age, race, ethnicity, and class.”13 Labor scholars have examined the salience of workers’ bodies across various occupations, including clothing and cosmetic retail, hospitality, aesthetic services, and the restaurant industry.14 Throughout, workers use their physicality to create part of the service rendered. Most of these jobs consist of beauty “display work,” whereby workers’ bodies are treated as objects to view, such as fashion models, adult entertainers, and sex workers.15 Clothing retail combines display work with interactional labor, in which customers and managers focus on attractiveness, dress, and workers’ demeanor, especially in branded firms that emphasize the performance of certain social tastes, manners, and sounds. We focus on workers’ embodiment of the body rules pervasive in this sector as another dimension of the service panopticon, which operates as a corporate arrangement to reinforce brand-based classed, gendered, sexualized, and racialized ideals.

Not all clothing retail workers perform aesthetic labor or follow specific body rules. Jobs occurring mostly in the back-of-store stockroom don’t create aesthetic value. Instead, these workers—like Kathleen’s poorly treated coworker at the boutique—remain largely invisible as they unpack shipments, attach price tags and security sensors, and move merchandise to the sales floor. Stella, who has work experience at Forever 21 and Macy’s, points out that both stores divide the labor between these more and less visible positions. Men, particularly Black and Latino men, tend to receive stockroom assignments, along with “a couple Hispanic women.

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