Introduction

Fashion studies

The speed at which the fashion system has been moving over the past several years is faster than ever before, but it is doing so, unexpectedly, as a counter-movement. Fashion is no longer running ahead of itself. Instead, it is undergoing an internal revolution, one that extends to every nook and cranny of its operations. We might even go so far as to say that the fashion system is unravelling. Many will see this moment of self-reckoning as welcome and long overdue (Hoskins 2014). What it seems to signal is, indeed, a process that is responding, by necessity, to the loud clamour of voices from outside as well as from inside, insisting that this sector has for too long relied on its own charisma, and that this will no longer suffice. If noisy campaigners, including key figures from inside the fashion system, argue that people have to 'buy less' in order to begin to undo the damage done to the environment by overproduction, and if there is awareness that saying 'buy better' is no solution if it means only the wealthy few can afford high-quality nontoxic items, then we can begin to see the nature of the kinds of arguments that are taking place. We are confronted by a rising tide of high-charged debate. Brexit and the pandemic have also necessitated substantial adjustment and change. Currently in the UK, government encourages the kind of small-scale fashion designers who play a key role in this book to rely on British-produced textiles and to use local supplies of labour for manufacturing. This corresponds with the 'Made in Britain' ethic, but it is also no more than flag-flying, glossing over the actual difficulties and the scaling-down of the global success of UK designers caused by Brexit. Since late 2020, when Brexit came into force, there have been endless delays in deliveries of EU-produced textiles. And there have been problems in getting finished goods from the UK to buyers and into boutiques across Europe. In the past, many young fashion creatives in the UK could rely on a few days of well-paid freelance work every so often in Paris, but this flow of labour has also been thwarted by Brexit.1

When, towards the end of this book, we sketch out and anticipate the development of a more regional and local fashion culture, with a less imperialistic role for London, we do not make such a claim in order merely to shore up a retrenchment of this 'Made in Britain' type. We envisage a new fashion imaginary which would entail the flourishing of local hubs and centres in a range of towns and cities in all three of the countries we look at here, and potentially elsewhere. Bearing in mind recent writing on the new localism and also on economies of care and community, one of the claims we make is that localization and regionalization would make for a more equitable fashion system, with employment possibilities for more people outside the prohibitively expensive fashion cities (Sandoval and Littler 2019; Brown and Jones 2021; The Care Collective 2020; Dowling 2020). There are then dramatic changes that both climate crisis campaigners and labour rights activists have been calling for, which are accompanied by other changes generated internally with the rise of e-commerce and what has become known as fashion-tech. At every level, then, there has been a kind of enforced institutional self-inspection. It is as if fashion has been required to open its books.

In this current book, our angle is set more narrowly on the everyday practices of fashion designers with an explicitly European focus. The work itself began before the outcome of the 2016 referendum. Despite that outcome, our vision continues to have this wider lens; indeed, we have found ourselves consistently moving beyond our initial frame because, in the course of the study, the radicalization of fashion referred to above has become a constant point of reference. And amidst the double impact of Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic, a whole new vocabulary has come into being. This does not mean that the big powerful players in fashion do not attempt to continue as before. In many respects, global fast fashion companies, even as they endorse green accountability schemes, will seek out new ways of appealing to younger people with ever cheaper bargain-type outfits. Likewise, it is important to note that we are not proposing that every small-scale independent designer has suddenly become a radical campaigner and activist. Fashion, as we point out in Chapter 1, has been, overall, a more conservative sector of the creative economy than many of its counterparts - for example, the pop music industry. The mainstream culture of fashion has only very recently been questioned, so perhaps it is early days to draw conclusions about how far the winds of change we refer to will blow. In the course of this book, we are steering a course between such momentous shifts; the tectonic plates that held fashion together have shifted and we are forced to adjust, while at the same time adhering to the values of the fields of established fashion scholarship.

For this study of small-scale fashion independents in three cities - London, Berlin and Milan - we find a primary home for research in the field that is most widely referred to as 'creative industry studies'. In this burgeoning area, there is a good deal of work being done across many forms of cultural production: the popular music industry, fine arts, publishing, theatre and the performing arts, film, gaming, TV and broadcasting and the social media industries. Fashion tends to fit in a relatively small corner, and this has been the case since the inception, in the early 2000s, of the UK government programme to expand and promote the creative economy. One reason for this marginal place is because fashion has a much bigger life elsewhere in the world of global fashion and clothing production. With its haute couture history and lineage of great names associated with luxury labels such as Dior, Chanel, Givenchy, Celine, Gucci, Prada and so on, the fashion industry has led to a substantial body of academic research as well as taught courses that specialize in designer history and brand management; more recently, dozens of prestigious MBAs in the fashion industry have sprung up. Vital as much of the scholarship and pedagogy is, our current study does not find a home here, even though we rely, especially in Chapter 5, on a range of up-to-the-moment reports on the global fashion brands usually published in conjunction with the online journal The Business of Fashion (http://www.businessoffashion.com). One reason for our distance from the business and management studies approach to fashion is that the corporate focus across the many journals and magazines tends to adopt an uncritical voice in relation to the political economy of the field, and it pays scant attention to labour issues and to the vast workforce employed across the world in fashion and clothing production. There is of course ongoing research on the global factory system, often concentrated in the Global South, where most of the fashion and clothing labour force is employed (Mezzadri 2017). There is a sizeable body of work that tracks the poor and hazardous and even inhumane conditions that prevail. Various studies point to the low wages and the few opportunities to organize for union recognition and to struggle for improvements in the work environment (Bonacich and Appelbaum 2000; Ross 2000). Research on the global factories reminds us that clothing production is indeed an essential service, not unlike food production. During the 2020-22 global pandemic, many fashion factories (for example in Turkey) were quickly switched over to manufacturing high volumes of scrubs and protective items for health and social care workers worldwide. But, more generally, every person on the planet relies on items of clothing, day and night, and from birth to death. And the fashion industry employs a vast workforce stretching from those who work behind the counter in busy shopping streets across the world, to those who pack in the new fulfilment centres located in urban peripheries for companies like ASOS or Amazon, to those employed in the global manufacturing industry in the thousands of factories and subcontracted production plants and units, many of which rely on female migrant labour. We only have to look at the label inside any of our items of clothing to see how widespread the location of these production centres is: from Vietnam, to Lithuania, from Turkey to Bangladesh to China. We flag this whole terrain as in urgent need of more sustained and dedicated social science research from feminist, class and postcolonial perspectives.

The field of fashion studies itself has also fed into the current work. This is now a prominent interdisciplinary space, which ranges from dress history and visual cultural studies to the sociology of fashion, from cultural geography to social anthropology, and from urban studies to postcolonial fashion studies. The journal Fashion Theory, edited by Valerie Steele at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, occupies the leading position. Throughout our investigation we drew on many of the now classic volumes that have been pivotal to the standing of fashion in the academy. And we found particular resonance in the new sociology of fashion labour (Rocamora 2011; Entwistle and Slater 2014; Wissinger 2015; Mensitieri 2021), where there is an overlap with our chosen main perspective - i.e., fashion as creative economy. Mensitieri throws a cold, sharp light on the working lives of the precariously employed Parisian workforce, many of whom live in cramped flats,...