Producing Fashion: Commerce, Culture, and Consumers. Ed. by Regina Lee Blaszczyk. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. viii, 363 pp. $55.00, ISBN 978-0-8122-4037-5.)

Abstract

When asked to define “fashion,” I usually resort to the academic equivalent of “I'm okay; you're okay.” I explain that scholars in various disciplines have different definitions according to their theoretical perspectives, research questions, and sources. Said another way, I avoid the question. In contrast, Regina Lee Blaszczyk begins Chapter 1 of Producing Fashion by recalling the bold query posed by the marketing consultant Estelle Ellis in a 1993 speech at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. Ellis, a veteran with more than fifty years of marketing experience, asked her audience: “What is fashion?” (p. 1). Her definition, which emphasized creativity, pervasiveness, and mobility, provides a framework for the essays in this wide-ranging and well-crafted collection. Producing Fashion is divided into four sections: “Organizing the Fashion Trades”; “Inventing Fashions, Promoting Styles”; “Shaping Bodies, Building Brands”; and “Customer Reactions, Consumer Adaptations.” All of the essays explore “fashion as a form of cultural production, as the richly textured interplay between economic institutions and private individuals, social trends and belief systems, entrepreneurs and tastemakers, marketers and consumers” (p. 4). Importantly, the essays contribute to restoring the voices and creativity of business people to the history of fashion. While we often conceive of creativity as an individual artistic impulse, the scholars writing here demonstrate how networked innovation, the interactions between business and culture or politics and culture, and consumer mediation combine to produce not simply the goods labeled fashionable but also the cultural value called fashion.