EXPRESS: From Streetwear to High Fashion: How Nonelite Producers Use Hybridization to Enter an Elite Category

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Gaining access to elite categories is challenging for nonelite producers. My longitudinal analysis of the evolution of the fashion market explains how some nonelite streetwear producers gained access to the elite high fashion category by creating an interstitial hybrid category—luxury streetwear—that bridged the two. Nonelite producers create a hybrid category by establishing commensurability with the elite category and generating appeal through cultural consonance. The hybrid category challenges the elite boundary while potentializing value creation for elites. In response, elite producers subsume the hybrid category, which resolves the challenge posed by nonelite producers and allows elites to capture the value introduced by nonelites by absorbing and exerting control over them. By doing so, elite producers rejuvenate their category’s cultural relevance and strengthen its elite status, while some nonelite producers gain access to the elite category. I contribute to research by theorizing nonelites’ status gains through categorical hybridization, an empirically prevalent but undertheorized phenomenon. I then leverage my theoretical insights to explain why subsumption solves cooptation issues, distinguish between collective and collaborative market driving, suggest that market actors can concomitantly participate in market maintenance and change, and offer managerial recommendations for nonelites to solidify status gains.