British Fashion Design: Rag Trade or Image Industry?

by Angela McRobbie

British Fashion Design explores the tensions between fashion as art form, and the demands of a ruthlessly commercial industry. Based on interviews and research conducted over a number of years, Angela McRobbie charts the flow of art school fashion graduates into the industry; their attempts to reconcile training with practice, and their precarious position between the twin supports of the education system and the commercial sector. Stressing the social context of cultural production, McRobbie focuses on British fashion and its graduate designers as products of youth street culture, and analyses how designers from diverse backgrounds have created a labour market for themselves, remodelling `enterprise culture` to suit their own careers.

Genres: Fashion, Nonfiction, Sociology, Reference, Politics, Feminism, Economics

216 pages, Hardcover

First published June 11, 1998

Reviews

[Malcolm · Rating 4 out of 5]

At one stage cultural studies went through (is still in?) a long conceptual detour that saw a focus on 'texts' as social products (which was good - it got us away from the high culture view of the genius artist) but that also treated these same texts as if they had no material existence. The downside of the rejection of the 'genius artist' was that these cultural texts were often still treated as the product of individual authorship - the contradictory strands that cultural studies was grappling with here should be obvious. At the same time, sociology was building its new grand narratives to cope with post-modernism's insistence that grand narratives were over - Focauldian governmentality, globalisation theory and so forth. As a result, there was very little in either sociology or cultural studies that dealt with the ways that the material artefacts of cultural life were produced.

In this context, then, McRobbie's British Fashion Design is a welcome challenge and a breath of fresh air. It is, as she admits, necessarily exploratory, eclectic, and partial, less a clear grand theoretical analysis than, as she notes, a tapestry that attempts to weave together the shape of the British fashion industry in the mid to late 1990s alongside the work practices and labour process of fashion production. Her sample is small, a group of recent graduates and a smaller set of established designers, all working in the 'conceptual/art' fashion arena rather than the areas she calls 'professional' (a definition of the market) or 'managerial' (a definition of the job - marketing and so forth) fashion. The case turns around three strands of circuits - designers' training in fashion academies (art and design schools), designers' work and employment, and designers' place in the fashion media.

It all adds up to a marginal, precarious, uncertain life and economic status that she sees as characteristics by four dimensions of ‘creative labour’ in fashion: 1) “frenetic level of movement” by people within the sector; 2) a ‘mixed economy’ where designers may have several jobs and employment statuses concurrently; 3) “the peculiar mix of not just the old and new, but pre-modern, modern and postmodern features of production coexisting in the same shared pace and time of the urban ‘studio-workshop’”; and 4) “persistent downgrading of the skills of making and sewing” (p 180).

The case is compelling and I see little in the fashion industry 15 years later that leads me to conclude that there have been major changes. If anything, as I look at and study the cultural industries, consider the increasing precariousness of work opportunities for my students on their graduation, and begin in a more rigorous manner to explore issues and ideas of the labour process in sport and leisure industries, the kinds of issues that McRobbie raises, the picture of the fashion industry both prompts new and challenging questions for me (and my students) and seems to be more rather then less typical of the sector as a whole. Sure, the details may change but many of the key conceptual points are distressingly common.

[Georgia Whitear · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think that everyone interested in pursuing a career within the fashion industry should have to read this book. A lot of it is quite depressing, highlighting the reality of how hard it is to become successful, and how even when you are considered 'successful', you probably aren't making enough money to live off without a patron or husband in the finance sector. I would be interested to see a 25 year update on this book, how some things have changed (mostly thanks to the internet) but much of it is pretty much the same.

[G 3 · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think that everyone interested in pursuing a career within the fashion industry should have to read this book. A lot of it is quite depressing, highlighting the reality of how hard it is to become successful, and how even when you are considered 'successful', you probably aren't making enough money to live off without a patron or husband in the finance sector. I would be interested to see a 25 year update on this book, how some things have changed (mostly thanks to the internet) but much of it is pretty much the same.