Fashion Landscapes: Networks, Markets, and Agents

Abstract

In previous work, Joanne Entwistle has identified areas in fashion stud ies where knowledge is lacking. In The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress, and Modern Social Theory (2000) for instance, she identifies lived experi ence and the economy as two spheres that demand further exploration. Entwistle stresses the dynamic nature of fashion and the fact that lived experience, culture, and economy intersect. She developed the notion of embodiment in previous work that captures fashion practices as they relate back to the body while simultaneously being situated and reproduced in a variety of contexts. In The Aesthetic Economy of Fashion: Markets and Values in Clothing and Modelling (2009) she singles out two cultural intermediaries or arbiters: fashion buyers at the high-end Selfridges department store in London and bookers of male models. Both shape the aesthetic within their own fields, which in turn influence, to some degree, the larger fash ion industry. To answer the question of how a particular fashion aesthetic takes shape, or indeed how aesthetic economies emerge, one might have expected an exploration of many fields, starting with fashion designers, stylists, editors, bloggers, and trend forecasters, leading perhaps to buyers and model agents, in the interest of understanding more about a complex industry that involves creation, production, distribution, and communication. Entwistle grasps two ropes—not the thickest ones—and decides to follow them throughout a deep and tangled journey, without being sure of how and where they will intersect. As Entwistle shows readers, there have been a variety of approaches that address how styles in fashion become trends, from Simmel’s topdown approach to Polhemus’s bottom-up approach, which considers the