Material Intimacies: The Labor of Creativity in the Global Fashion Industry

Abstract

My dissertation explores the global fashion industry through Material Intimacies, the social relationships and intimate encounters of new classes of fashion workers in the material and immaterial making of fashion. Based on three years of ethnographic field research in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Guangzhou, and Seoul, my dissertation explores the everyday and rarefied spaces of the fashion world to connect the experiences of fashion workers with new forms of creative practice and labor emerging from the global fashion industry. These fashion workers connect global fashion design capitals with vast manufacturing landscapes around the world, refigure the meaning of value, labor, and creativity in the fashions they make, and powerfully shape our experience of clothing and material realities. Countering the impersonal forces of economics that often characterize the global fashion industry, these fashion workers paint an intimate landscape of ongoing transnational social ties and cultural exchange, challenging the anonymity of how global capitalism operates.