A Macro Perspective on Status Dynamics: The Hollowing Out and Hallowing of Haute Couture

Abstract

Extant organizational status research has dedicated significant attention to the dynamics underlying status-based market interactions as well as the potential sources of alterations in actors’ status positions. It has, however, provided few insights into the status dynamics of an entire field. In this research, we shed light on the categorical work undertaken to preserve a category’s status over time in the context of an evolving status order. We explore our research question in the field of the French high-end fashion industry, from 1911 until today. This setting is appropriate because high-end fashion is structured by a sophisticated stratified system of categories and key actors who actively contribute to the construction and alteration of these categories. Focusing on the haute couture category, we show how, over time, the field main professional association attempted to juggle two imperatives that became increasingly at odds: maintaining the category status while ensuring its survival. We argue that such status maintenance work can only be understood by taking into account the status order in which the category is embedded, an order contested and remodeled through the joint influence of endogenous and exogenous forces.