Abstract
To most people, fashion can daze and confuse.1 On the one hand, fashion professionals often feel overwhelmed by the pace of change in the industry, as well as by the pressure exerted on them to squeeze a living out of an inherently creative process that is undoubtedly a form of artistic expression. In a recent (and rare) interview given to Le Monde Magazine, the celebrated, Tunisian-born, Paris-based fashion designer Azzedine Alaïa complained:2 “Why do they force fashion designers to produce, produce, produce? Productivity, productivity, budget, productivity. […] Today, the only thing I want is more time to be creative! […] This is all I want: to do my job as a couturier, but do it well. Otherwise, I’ll leave the field.” This is quite a striking comment made by one of the most influential designers in the world and a remarkable expression of the key tension that exists in fashion between creativity and financial profit.
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Notes
Among all the journalistic accounts of the worlds of fashion and luxury published over the last ten years, two are particularly enjoyable and informative: Mark Tungate, Fashion Brands: Branding Style from Armani to Zara (London: KoganPage, 2005);
Dana Thomas, Deluxe: How Luxury Lost its Luster (London: Penguin Books, 2007).
Although cinema is a close second: Stephen Gundle, Glamour: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
Diana Crane and Laura Bovone, “Approaches to Material Culture: The Sociology of Fashion and Clothing,” Poetics 34, no. 6 (2006); Gilles Lipovetsky, The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, [1987] 1994);
Yuniya Kawamura, Fashion-ology: An Introduction to Fashion Studies (New York: Berg, 2005).
Nicoletta Giusti, Introduzione allo studio della moda (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2009).
Richard E. Caves, Creative Industries: Contracts Between Art and Commerce (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 2000).
Fred Davis, Fashion, Culture, and Identity (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992);
Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, New Accents (London: Routledge, 1979).
Georg Simmel et al., La Parure et autres essais (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1998).
Georg Simmel, “Fashion,” American Journal of Sociology 62, no. 6 (1904); Gabriel Tarde, The Laws of Imitation (New York: Henry Holt and Company, [1890] 1903).
Karl Popper The Logic of Scientific Discovery. (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1959).
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 1962).
Andrew Hargadon, How Breakthroughs Happen: The Surprising Truth About How Companies Innovate (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2003).
Philip H. Ennis, The Seventh Stream: The Emergence of Rocknroll in American Popular Music (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1992).
Philippe Besnard and Guy Desplanques, Un prénom pour toujours: la cote des prénoms, hier, aujourd’hui et demain (Balland, 1986);
Stanley Lieberson, A Matter of Taste: How Names, Fashions, and Culture Change (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
Veronica Manlow, Designing Clothes: Culture and Organization of the Fashion Industry (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2007).
Farid Chenoune, Des modes et des hommes (Paris: Flammarion, 1993).
Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life: A Study in Religious Sociology (New York: Macmillan, [1912] 1926).
Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (Berkeley: University of California Press, [1922] 1968).
Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).
Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992);
Gisèle Sapiro, La Guerre des écrivains: 1940–1953, Histoire de la pensée (Paris: Fayard, 1999).
Raymonde Moulin, Le Marché de la peinture en France, Le Sens commun. (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1967);
Alain Quemin, Les Commissaires-priseurs: la mutation d’une profession, Sociologiques (Paris: Anthropos, 1997).
Dominic Power and Allen John Scott, Cultural Industries and the Production of Culture (London: Routledge, 2004).
Richard L. Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002).
Ashley Mears, Pricing Beauty: The Making of a Fashion Model (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
Patrik Aspers, Orderly Fashion: A Sociology of Markets (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
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© 2012 Frédéric Godart
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Godart, F. (2012). Introduction — The Six Principles of Fashion. In: Unveiling Fashion. INSEAD Business Press. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137000743_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137000743_1
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