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Angela McRobbie

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Beschreibung

Fashion is under the spotlight like never before. Activists call for environmental accountability, and wide-ranging debates highlight exploitation across global supply chains and the reliance on unpaid labour. Digital technology undermines traditional fashion companies, while small-scale independent fashion designers provide radical innovations in design and work in more socially inclusive ways. This book contributes to a new sociology of fashion. Focusing on the working lives of independent designers and based on ethnographic research and interviews carried out in London, Berlin and Milan, the authors consider the urban policy regimes in place in these cities. They analyse how these regimes shape the microenterprises and the emerging political economy, as well as the structures needed for designers to flourish. They also develop several key concepts - the 'milieu of fashion labour', 'social fashion' and 'fashion diversity' - and chart the new world of digital fashion-tech and e-commerce. Drawing on lessons from European initiatives and recognizing the capacity of microenterprises and start-ups to determine fashion's future, the authors call for the industry to be significantly decentralized to ensure more diversity and less exclusivity.

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Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright Page

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Fashion studies

New ways of doing fashion

The chapters

Notes

1 Critical Fashion Studies: Paradigms for Creative Industries Research

Introduction

Cultural policy

Milieu of labour

Art theory

The object itself

Notes

2 London: Independent Fashion and ‘Monopoly Rent’

Introduction: The ‘futures’ student as human capital

From the new King’s Cross to Hackney Wick Fish Island

The

milieu of labour

: London

Fashion independents: Making a living

The precarity of success?

Conclusion

Notes

3 Berlin: Microenterprises and the Social Face of Fashion

Introduction: The precarity of underemployment

The

milieu of labour

: Berlin

Fashion creativity in active neighbourhoods

Social fashion in the city

Fashion as art, fashion as social enterprise

Conclusion

Notes

4 Milan: Fashion Microenterprises and Female-led Artisanship

Introduction: City of global brands

The

milieu of labour

: Milan

Benetton and beyond

Female-led artisanship: Milanese small-scale fashion production

Conclusion

Notes

5 Click and Collect: Fashion’s New Political Economy

Introduction: The new political economy

The new world of ‘listing labour’

Designers in multimediated fashion worlds

Ajax, Birdsong and Not Just A Label

Conclusion

Notes

6 Conclusion

Appendix

Berlin

London

Milan

Events hosted

Methodological note

References

Further Reading

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

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Fashion as Creative Economy

Microenterprises in London, Berlin and Milan

Angela McRobbie, Daniel Strutt and Carolina Bandinelli

polity

Copyright Page

Copyright © Angela McRobbie, Daniel Strutt and Carolina Bandinelli 2023

The right of Angela McRobbie, Daniel Strutt and Carolina Bandinelli to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2023 by Polity Press

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

111 River Street

Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5384-6

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5385-3(pb)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022939411

by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

Acknowledgements

To describe this book as a team effort would be a major understatement, not only because it is co-authored, but because over the course of the research and across the cities of London, Berlin, Milan and Glasgow, we were joined by a lively group of design professionals, artists and cultural policymakers as well as by keen and radical students spanning many subject areas. We also accumulated various experts on the way, including advocates of independent fashion, consultants, environmental campaigners and activists. At the end of the conclusion, we list the designers who took part and whom we interviewed for the study. Here we offer our profound thanks to the others; for the sake of space, we do not include their various titles.

We offer thanks to the two principal investigators, Martin Kretschmer and Philip Schlesinger, for their academic leadership throughout the course of the CREATe research project, of which this study was a part. CREATe (Creativity, Regulation, Enterprise and Technology), formally launched in 2013, is the UK Copyright and Creative Economy Centre at Glasgow University, an interdisciplinary research programme jointly funded by the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council), the EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) and ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council). We also thank Chris Breward of the National Museums Scotland for taking part in the May 2016 event hosted by the Glasgow School of Art.

In London, we thank Orsola de Castro of Fashion Revolution for taking part in the event we hosted in 2015 at the Royal Society for the Arts. We also thank Zowie Broach from the Royal College of Art, designer Bethany Williams and Lola Young from the House of Lords for joining us at Goldsmiths, University of London, in June 2020 for our Fashion’s Futures event, which marked the end-point of the study. Various colleagues at Goldsmiths participated in and supported this work, including Sarah Kember, Janis Jefferies, Lisa Blackman, Joanna Zylinska, Sian Prime and Nicola Searle. The artist and photographer Pau Delgado Iglesias joined us from Uruguay for the trips to Glasgow and Berlin; she created a wonderful set of images from the events. Tania Phipps-Rufus provided great insight on fashion law in the earlier stages of the work.

In Berlin, we were guided through the fashion system by Oliver MacConnell, Ares Kalandides, Alexandra Manske, Bastian Lange, Timo Pape, Martina Loew, Bettina Springer, Agnes Zelei, Hannah Curran-Troop, Marina Nikitina and Clara Brandenburg. We would also like to thank Elke Ritt from the British Council, Berlin, who provided us with the marvellous space at Alexanderplatz for an afternoon conference.

In Milan, our team included Giannino Malossi, Zoe Romano and Adam Arvidsson. In Paris (Parsons Paris), we were invited to share the findings by Giulia Mensitieri, and she in turn joined us in London at the Royal Society for the Arts. And from the newly created Critical Fashion Studies Seminar, we offer thanks to Jo Entwistle, Agnès Rocamora and Jane Tynan.

Finally, we would like to thank Polity Press, and especially Mary Savigar for her enthusiasm for this project.

Introduction

Fashion studies

The speed at which the fashion system has been moving over the past several years is faster than ever before, but it is doing so, unexpectedly, as a counter-movement. Fashion is no longer running ahead of itself. Instead, it is undergoing an internal revolution, one that extends to every nook and cranny of its operations. We might even go so far as to say that the fashion system is unravelling. Many will see this moment of self-reckoning as welcome and long overdue (Hoskins 2014). What it seems to signal is, indeed, a process that is responding, by necessity, to the loud clamour of voices from outside as well as from inside, insisting that this sector has for too long relied on its own charisma, and that this will no longer suffice. If noisy campaigners, including key figures from inside the fashion system, argue that people have to ‘buy less’ in order to begin to undo the damage done to the environment by overproduction, and if there is awareness that saying ‘buy better’ is no solution if it means only the wealthy few can afford high-quality nontoxic items, then we can begin to see the nature of the kinds of arguments that are taking place. We are confronted by a rising tide of high-charged debate. Brexit and the pandemic have also necessitated substantial adjustment and change. Currently in the UK, government encourages the kind of small-scale fashion designers who play a key role in this book to rely on British-produced textiles and to use local supplies of labour for manufacturing. This corresponds with the ‘Made in Britain’ ethic, but it is also no more than flag-flying, glossing over the actual difficulties and the scaling-down of the global success of UK designers caused by Brexit. Since late 2020, when Brexit came into force, there have been endless delays in deliveries of EU-produced textiles. And there have been problems in getting finished goods from the UK to buyers and into boutiques across Europe. In the past, many young fashion creatives in the UK could rely on a few days of well-paid freelance work every so often in Paris, but this flow of labour has also been thwarted by Brexit.1

When, towards the end of this book, we sketch out and anticipate the development of a more regional and local fashion culture, with a less imperialistic role for London, we do not make such a claim in order merely to shore up a retrenchment of this ‘Made in Britain’ type. We envisage a new fashion imaginary which would entail the flourishing of local hubs and centres in a range of towns and cities in all three of the countries we look at here, and potentially elsewhere. Bearing in mind recent writing on the new localism and also on economies of care and community, one of the claims we make is that localization and regionalization would make for a more equitable fashion system, with employment possibilities for more people outside the prohibitively expensive fashion cities (Sandoval and Littler 2019; Brown and Jones 2021; The Care Collective 2020; Dowling 2020). There are then dramatic changes that both climate crisis campaigners and labour rights activists have been calling for, which are accompanied by other changes generated internally with the rise of e-commerce and what has become known as fashion-tech. At every level, then, there has been a kind of enforced institutional self-inspection. It is as if fashion has been required to open its books.

In this current book, our angle is set more narrowly on the everyday practices of fashion designers with an explicitly European focus. The work itself began before the outcome of the 2016 referendum. Despite that outcome, our vision continues to have this wider lens; indeed, we have found ourselves consistently moving beyond our initial frame because, in the course of the study, the radicalization of fashion referred to above has become a constant point of reference. And amidst the double impact of Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic, a whole new vocabulary has come into being. This does not mean that the big powerful players in fashion do not attempt to continue as before. In many respects, global fast fashion companies, even as they endorse green accountability schemes, will seek out new ways of appealing to younger people with ever cheaper bargain-type outfits. Likewise, it is important to note that we are not proposing that every small-scale independent designer has suddenly become a radical campaigner and activist. Fashion, as we point out in Chapter 1, has been, overall, a more conservative sector of the creative economy than many of its counterparts – for example, the pop music industry. The mainstream culture of fashion has only very recently been questioned, so perhaps it is early days to draw conclusions about how far the winds of change we refer to will blow. In the course of this book, we are steering a course between such momentous shifts; the tectonic plates that held fashion together have shifted and we are forced to adjust, while at the same time adhering to the values of the fields of established fashion scholarship.

For this study of small-scale fashion independents in three cities – London, Berlin and Milan – we find a primary home for research in the field that is most widely referred to as ‘creative industry studies’. In this burgeoning area, there is a good deal of work being done across many forms of cultural production: the popular music industry, fine arts, publishing, theatre and the performing arts, film, gaming, TV and broadcasting and the social media industries. Fashion tends to fit in a relatively small corner, and this has been the case since the inception, in the early 2000s, of the UK government programme to expand and promote the creative economy. One reason for this marginal place is because fashion has a much bigger life elsewhere in the world of global fashion and clothing production. With its haute couture history and lineage of great names associated with luxury labels such as Dior, Chanel, Givenchy, Celine, Gucci, Prada and so on, the fashion industry has led to a substantial body of academic research as well as taught courses that specialize in designer history and brand management; more recently, dozens of prestigious MBAs in the fashion industry have sprung up. Vital as much of the scholarship and pedagogy is, our current study does not find a home here, even though we rely, especially in Chapter 5, on a range of up-to-the-moment reports on the global fashion brands usually published in conjunction with the online journal The Business of Fashion (http://www.businessoffashion.com). One reason for our distance from the business and management studies approach to fashion is that the corporate focus across the many journals and magazines tends to adopt an uncritical voice in relation to the political economy of the field, and it pays scant attention to labour issues and to the vast workforce employed across the world in fashion and clothing production. There is of course ongoing research on the global factory system, often concentrated in the Global South, where most of the fashion and clothing labour force is employed (Mezzadri 2017). There is a sizeable body of work that tracks the poor and hazardous and even inhumane conditions that prevail. Various studies point to the low wages and the few opportunities to organize for union recognition and to struggle for improvements in the work environment (Bonacich and Appelbaum 2000; Ross 2000). Research on the global factories reminds us that clothing production is indeed an essential service, not unlike food production. During the 2020–22 global pandemic, many fashion factories (for example in Turkey) were quickly switched over to manufacturing high volumes of scrubs and protective items for health and social care workers worldwide. But, more generally, every person on the planet relies on items of clothing, day and night, and from birth to death. And the fashion industry employs a vast workforce stretching from those who work behind the counter in busy shopping streets across the world, to those who pack in the new fulfilment centres located in urban peripheries for companies like ASOS or Amazon, to those employed in the global manufacturing industry in the thousands of factories and subcontracted production plants and units, many of which rely on female migrant labour. We only have to look at the label inside any of our items of clothing to see how widespread the location of these production centres is: from Vietnam, to Lithuania, from Turkey to Bangladesh to China. We flag this whole terrain as in urgent need of more sustained and dedicated social science research from feminist, class and postcolonial perspectives.

The field of fashion studies itself has also fed into the current work. This is now a prominent interdisciplinary space, which ranges from dress history and visual cultural studies to the sociology of fashion, from cultural geography to social anthropology, and from urban studies to postcolonial fashion studies. The journal Fashion Theory, edited by Valerie Steele at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, occupies the leading position. Throughout our investigation we drew on many of the now classic volumes that have been pivotal to the standing of fashion in the academy. And we found particular resonance in the new sociology of fashion labour (Rocamora 2011; Entwistle and Slater 2014; Wissinger 2015; Mensitieri 2021), where there is an overlap with our chosen main perspective – i.e., fashion as creative economy. Mensitieri throws a cold, sharp light on the working lives of the precariously employed Parisian workforce, many of whom live in cramped flats, earning just a trickle of income that is barely enough to live on, while being constantly seduced by the glamour of the grandes maisons. Our preference for a perspective that, in the first instance, draws on creative industries vocabularies rests on the emphasis in this area on the urban policies that are orchestrated by various layers of government, which, while they discipline and constrain the sorts of practices that exist in so many urban spaces, also provide the kind of wider recognition and legitimation that what goes on in the small ateliers, in the home studios, or in the co-working spaces, is significant and worthy of support. Urban cultural policies are arguably performative in this respect. What they name as a cultural practice is subsequently given legitimacy. This is important for the mostly young women’s start-up activities. It means grants can be applied for. We grapple with this double bind of constraint and facilitation through our use of the concept of milieu of labour. If this is the open-ended spatial web of policymaking and academic as well as administrative decision-making, which provides a range of services from the pedagogic to the place-related and infrastructural, all of which underscore small-scale fashion practice, it is also a space we, as a team of academic researchers, find ourselves inhabiting. And so we are both inside and outside this space of urban governance. Throughout the course of our research, we often found ourselves called upon to play an advocacy role, giving talks to policy forums with ideas that emanated from the ongoing discussions we were having with the designers. This required self-reflexivity at all times. We were also constantly interrogating our own mixed feelings based, on the one hand, on wanting these small-scale entrepreneurs to succeed, since, after they had joined our project, we found them all to be so amiable and interesting, but, on the other hand questioning whether this compromised our sociological activity. And how do the practitioners respond, in the end, to our argument, and our call for regional, diverse and socially engaged fashion? For sure, we cannot take their agreement for granted.

Fashion as creative economy is also our chosen point of reference because the design headquarters and the image industries underpinning this world of fashion production are most often located in major cities, as are the art and design schools where cohorts of graduates in a now significantly increased range of fashion courses are trained for the industry. This is where the many policies for the expansion of fashion education and the frequent tie-ins with programmes for urban development take shape. Young people bring new ideas and fresh thinking into the wider industry even when, as we know, their creations can nowadays be instantly copied and cheap fast fashion versions put into production in the blink of an eye. Young designers are also widely recognized for the new outlook and willingness to experiment that they bring to the industry, even when they often struggle to make a living and pay rent. The research on which this book is based recognizes the importance of all the adjacent perspectives outlined above, and, where relevant, we draw attention to the power of the big brands that can swoop in to offer sponsorship deals to the microenterprises as a way of stabilizing their precarious economies, albeit in ways that also, of course, are beneficial to the luxury brands themselves. In years to come it will be imperative for critical fashion studies research to be more fully concerned with the political economy of the whole system, and to track the shaky and uneven movements of the major conglomerates especially as they seek to define the parameters of e-retail in the new fashion-tech world, and often relying, as we show in Chapter 5, on vast borrowing from global, and especially Chinese, private equity companies.

New ways of doing fashion

Positioning this study in the field of fashion as creative economy also gives us a licence to extend to fashion some neo-Marxist vocabularies. In 2000, Andrew Ross edited the volume No Sweat, which was a considerable intervention into the field of fashion, reporting on labour relations and supply chain issues and bringing a wide-ranging neo-Marxist perspective to bear on the field. However, at the time, this spoke only to a limited readership. More than two decades later, the whole political atmosphere for fashion studies has changed and there is a profound openness to these very issues. By drawing on the creative industry approach, we are therefore able to refer to processes of precarization and to the power of finance capitalism. We draw on David Harvey (2008) to consider how monopoly rent and speculative capital function in the fashion world. We also draw attention to questions of debt, especially in the form of student loans (Ross 2013). Various other concepts make an appearance, from immaterial labour to the degradation of work. The bigger challenge for future scholars is to stretch and amend these to take into account the climate crisis. When luxury companies burn huge piles of unsold prohibitively expensive items, not only can this be seen as an act of violence to the environment, but also it connects with Marx’s own analysis of commodity fetishism. The work put into making the £5,000 bag is wholly disguised and made invisible by the halo effect and the layers of meanings that the single bag is made to bear, as if by magic. The bag is then quietly but ritualistically destroyed for fear of losing the aura if it ends up in a sale. This single act, only recently reported on, tells us so much about fashion’s political economy. But it is of course exploited labour that is most fundamental to what a new Marxist sociology of fashion would look like. The reliance on cheap labour in mega-factories, most of which are in the Global South, also exists in urban centres. Sometimes it is the unpaid labour of eager interns; elsewhere it is the clandestine exploitation, even modern slavery, of migrant labourers, as became especially apparent during the pandemic lockdown in the UK (Sullivan 2022). Disclosures about sexual exploitation at work also reflect many of the themes in current feminist scholarship, across lines of class, race and ethnicity. In some cases, when this comes to light following, for example, disclosures from top models, brands that have been favourites with teenage girls suddenly lose value and even have to go into administration.

Not only has the whole fashion system now found itself open to constant scrutiny, but so also have all the previous stable institutions been undermined and forced to examine their own practices. It used to be the case that the mainstream of fashion journalism, no matter how well informed and professional, was expected to adopt a deferential stance to the brands connected with leading designers, or else risk not being granted an invitation and front row position at the seasonal collections, and hence not being well informed. This has been swept away not only by the pandemic and the shift to shows being online, but also by the increasing use of social media for fashion ideas and information and the consequent decline of the fashion print media. Online bloggers and influencers have shown themselves to be more tuned in to social change than their gatekeeping counterparts in the now seemingly old-fashioned magazines (Rocamora 2011, 2017, 2022; Duffy 2016). These young fashion writers, who are not expecting the coveted invitations, are free to cast judgements that would otherwise be stifled. They have shaken up the establishment by this kind of openness; many have also become activists and campaigners, while others have created huge streams of income from the brands under the new remit of influencer marketing (Rocamora 2022). With print magazines no longer being the first port of call for readers, the stabilizing effect that journalists brought to the field of fashion has been swept away. Indeed, we can trace the way in which the bolder voices of fashion bloggers then recursively push the formerly deferential fashion journalists inside the leading newspapers to themselves speak out and engage with topics hitherto unthinkable.

This is the wider context that has transformed how we now think about fashion. In recent reports and case studies presented in research undertaken at the London College of Fashion, many of the participants who, like those in our study, are young designers keen to see their ideas brought to fruition through developing their studio practice, have a whole new vocabulary when they describe work methods (Fostering Sustainable Practices, 2021). Instead of thinking only in terms of growth, they endorse other activities that could complement their practices. Many are interested in fashion and community work, and almost all base their work on ‘dead stock’. This chimed with our own account and with the idea that ‘fashion can be different’ and with the concept of ‘social fashion’. All of which rests on an ethos of care for the environment. From our own study, we found micro-companies engaged in developing nontoxic ways of producing textiles, including the use of milk fibres. More widely, there is now remarkable experimentation going on far and wide – not just recycling, but also various soil and nature-based activities, such as the use of pineapples or mushrooms or even dog and horsehair for creating new kinds of textiles. The focus in this book, however, is on working lives and on what is required of small-scale fashion practitioners to keep their livelihoods on a pathway that brings in an income and allows them to carry on. These are not individuals driven by a desire to be a successful entrepreneur; instead, they are fashion professionals. And in these changed times, some words seem to drop by the wayside. There is less attention to customers and to markets. The designers need to sell their work, but they now focus on the relationship with the people who like the work as a whole and who share the value system of the collections. They will nurture this community-clientele with newsletters and updates, and they will also host social events, talks and parties, where items from the collections can be purchased. The ethos of the relationship with the community of people interested in their work corresponds to the green agenda. By making to order, there is less wastage.

The chapters

Chapter 1 of this book provides an extensive overview of the field of creative economy research and proposes that there are four dominant paradigms that give shape and substance to the terrain. We are keen here to introduce ideas from art theory and apply them to the terrain of creative industry studies. The adventurous stance adopted by art theorists, as they wholly revise and even reinvent what we mean by art today, also opens up a wider constituency to the neo-Marxist political economy they bring to bear on the activities that take place in art worlds (Fuller and Weizman 2021). In the course of this chapter we also emphasize the need for the object that is the outcome of the aesthetic work – i.e., the art work itself, or the fashion collection – to occupy a place in the analysis. And this means reinstating the very thing the art theorists have in effect dislodged or dethroned. However, the context here would be to show how items or material objects flow and circulate, and how, for example, a single dress worn by a celebrity or well-known person can provide the kind of boost for an independent designer that will trigger a run of sales and result in a cashflow beyond their wildest dreams. This can prompt the interest of larger brands offering valuable sponsorship deals, such that an almost entirely separate level of economic activity takes off, even if it turns out to be just a short-lived flash in the pan, giving rise to a ‘precarity of success’. The chapter as a whole lays the foundations for the remainder of the book, and the focus on the independent microeconomies in the three cities of London, Berlin and Milan.

In Chapter 2, our focus is on London. Drawing on some of the concepts from the art theory work referred to above, we lay out the parameters of what could conceivably be a new political economy of fashion, with London as a global fashion centre. We argue that the devastating impact of neoliberal economic policies in the city has reached into the seminar rooms and classrooms where fashion is taught and that the outcome has resulted in, among other things, a significant generational cleavage. For a cohort now in their late thirties (including all the people we interviewed), who more or less managed to avoid the exponential rise in rent for both home and workspace, it is just about possible to keep going, although even for former prize-winners it is an uphill struggle. They have constantly to come up with strategies that might mean temporarily moving abroad or moving to the country and working remotely. In this chapter, we introduce the concept that emerged throughout the period of our empirical work: namely, the idea of the milieu of fashion labour. In London we argue that this space of activity is concentrated in the art and design schools, part of the bigger university system. We discuss how these institutions have come to occupy pivotal positions in the fashion world. But the changes brought about by the processes of neoliberalism, including the fee regime for university tuition, have resulted in the instrumentalization of the figure of the student, especially the art or fashion student. He or she becomes a kind of guarantee of economic value on the futures markets of finance capital. An ‘urban glamour zone’ can be built on the backs of the students (Sassen 2002). They attract the interest of property developers, who have an eye on the high profit margins from new housing projects adjacent to educational and cultural complexes, with, at the time of writing, small one-bedroom starter flats priced at around £450,000. So what emerges is a set of urban programmes that reproduce and heighten existing social inequality. Students and graduates from average or low-income families cannot afford to live in the adjacent new and gleaming neighbourhoods near to their colleges, nor can they, as young designers or more generic ‘creatives’, afford studio space. And so, despite talk about commitments to widen inclusion and doing more for disadvantaged sectors of the population, the social net for becoming a successful designer counterintuitively narrows. We make the double case for the decentralization of fashion culture away from London and the South-East, and for the new moral accountability of the universities that have found themselves players in the futures market for private equity and hedge-fund capitalism. Through the course of our interviews, studio visits and events with London-based designers, we draw attention to the agility and versatility they must show in order to maintain their professional work. Their own infrastructures require many personal and private arrangements even when their talent gains international recognition. Overall, the milieu of labour needs a major revamp with a much stronger policy agenda to support this stronghold of UK talent, or else it will simply seep away. At the same time, change can be effected if these kinds of issues are integrated into the fashion studies curriculum. Graduate students might feel more committed to staying put in their home cities outside London and putting their energies into creating vibrant fashion cultures away from the metropolis. Faculty have a key role to play here.

In Chapter 3, we trace the activities that give shape and character to the Berlin fashion scene. Here, the milieu of fashion labour comprises the field of urban cultural policy, and our argument is that, with a lack of high fashion culture in the city and, indeed, in Germany as a whole, it is the creative economy initiatives that, since the early 2000s, have legitimated independent fashion practices, with art and design universities more in the background. In Berlin, it is local government (Senate) that has understood the value of these activities, albeit for city-branding exercises and for building on Berlin’s historic reputation for club culture and other night-time economies.2 We also argue that Berlin fashion relies on this subcultural history, even though the pandemic interrupted so many of its activities. Most significant for the Berlin fashion scene are the social enterprise agenda and the strategies that nurture more inclusive activities for training and for supporting employment among socially disadvantaged groups, mostly women. This takes a range of forms, and it does not mean that the aesthetic and avant-garde elements are subdued or less important. Instead, there is a knitting together of a range of practices, from a small Berlin couture (and made-to-order) sector, to various start-up practices, many of which foreground an emphasis on sustainability, to the activities of fashion social entrepreneurs who have pioneered models for fair and ethical producer services increasingly based on e-business models. The defining element across this terrain is access to sociable space for atelier activity and for having a shopfront in neighbourhoods busy enough to attract attention. Affordable space is then integral to this milieu of labour, in sharp contrast to its London counterpart, and we cite this Berlin formula, not in a rose-tinted way, but as marking a potential for a more dispersed regional local model of ‘social fashion’. There is precarity for sure in Berlin, where the milieu of labour carries a tension within it, on the one hand with elements of support tailored to fit the city’s self-employed sector, while, on the other, it is constantly looking for ways to reduce subsidies and lower the social wage threshold.

In Chapter 4, our attention turns to Milan, where we confront head-on the very different status of fashion in Italy, where it is, and has long been, a major industry from north to south. Despite the importance of fashion over the decades for so many people’s livelihoods, it has never had the status and significance given to the car industry of the North. It has never attracted the full attention of the state, reflecting the degraded fate of fashion as viewed from a patriarchal industrial and postindustrial optic. Our research in Milan finds a less cohesive independent fashion culture and instead a set of more disparate practices set in a context of disillusionment with the grandes maisons and also high rates of graduate unemployment. The milieu of fashion labour was also distinctly absent in the sense of a presiding set of institutions; instead, we pinpoint it as residing in the context of family, including the extended family and community. The reason this can play the role of a milieu of labour is because of the long-established artisanal tradition and the expanse of the entire fashion sector, which means that there is an extensive skills base and it is possible, through word of mouth, for would-be independent designers to plug into these existing channels, in some cases, as we show, developing a new family business system this time led by women. This leads us to make the case for a female-led, small-scale fashion culture springing into being that partly reflects the new feminist politics of the 2010s, especially given that the young graduates in question are desperate to find a professional identity in a context where the big brands appear to be opaque, if not nepotistic and patriarchal, in their recruitment practices. Meanwhile, at ground level the idea of developing new skills, for example in leather or in handling and working with silk, and of gaining access to local workshops, is not a complicated affair; as older male artisanal workers retire and step down, there is the potential for more young women to discover these practices. With a few small signs of state-led cultural policy activity being directed to independent fashion, mostly in response to radical campaigns to support a start-up culture, we draw attention to the dire need for more proactive responses at city and regional level. This could also in effect rekindle the now lost ideas of the Third Italy and the regional and district strategies that attracted such attention in the 1980s.3 In this regard, we trace an ironic line that connected the Third Italy with so-called ‘Benetton Britain’ ideas of the late 1980s, precursors of the major creative industry initiatives of the following decade (Murray 1989a). British Marxist economists and sociologists saw potential in the district clusters of the Northern Italy area, which had come to be seen as the frontrunners for post-Fordist production on the basis of the high skills and hi-tech centres supported by smaller family firms dotted on the outlying areas, but with rapid transport links, etc. As we show in this chapter, this fashion activity of local entrepreneurship (from gloves and shoes to scarves and jumpers) provided some kind of postindustrial potential for the British left, a model that could be adapted and adjusted to support a higher wage economy with more rewarding work carrying cultural value (which is not so far away from our own conclusions three decades later).

In Chapter 5, attention is directed to the rise of fashion-tech, e-commerce and the daily practices of ‘click and collect’. We widen our lens here to focus on the new political economy of fashion as it is rapidly evolving. Here again we point to the power of venture capital and the futures market, which see money (billions of dollars) pour into the high-end platforms that have been set up to deliver luxury fashion to customers worldwide. Of course, the question has been about how they can duplicate the VIP-type service that prevailed in the days of bricks and mortar, which is now rapidly being replaced by a range of experimental forms of retailing (Rocamora 2017). Our aim in this chapter is to present an overview, but with a focus on the consequences for fashion labour across the new sites for fashion e-commerce, extending from the logistical labour of transportation and delivery to the packing labour in fulfilment centres, most of which are in out-of-town locations, to what Tamara Kneese and Michael Palm (2020) label ‘listing labour’, which refers to the often invisible work of describing items in fine detail (from where zips are located to the kind of buttons used), and then also providing more details about after-care of items, as well as preparing items for careful packaging and posting. This is the wider context for a new fashion-tech milieu of labour. The chapter also includes three case studies: with one large-scale company and two online-only fashion start-ups. Overall, this chapter emerges from the kind of everyday observation that shopping for clothes has changed in a seemingly irreversible way. From the days when someone would browse the shoe department at John Lewis (in the UK) for example, and find a range of perhaps 50–60 pairs of suitable winter boots to choose from, to a time when a customer browsing online on the John Lewis website, even with the use of filters that will remove many unwanted styles, is confronted with a choice that extends to more than 500 items, as well as sales stock on top of this, with the promise of delivery to a local outlet in 24–48 hours and with a guarantee of easy returns if the goods do not match expectations. This model, as we know, is duplicated across many platforms, from, for example, Zalando, which was set up by two engineers in Berlin in 2008, to ASOS, with a head office in London and wealthy enough to have been able to purchase Topshop in 2021. Sociologically this transformation is formidable for the consequences it has for the retail workforces, and extraordinary given the honoured place of high street shopping in the cultures of both urban modernity and postmodernity. It will require more sustained attention in years to come.

This final point reflects the emphasis in the concluding Chapter 6. It is as if the sociological moment for fashion studies has arrived. If politically it is now possible to reimagine fashion as a more socially just practice, which also reduces its own harm element to the planet substantially, then academia will be a key place for this set of ideas to take root. In many respects this is already happening, and it is not our intention to claim a lead role here. Overall, we have attempted to develop a formula to reflect what critical fashion studies might entail. And we are indebted to the younger doctoral scholars coming up who are already undertaking innovative work on a wide range of socially relevant topics across the fashion and beauty industries spectrum.