Fashion Landscapes: Networks, Markets, and Agents

In previous work, Joanne Entwistle has identified areas in fashion studies where knowledge is lacking. In The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress, and Modern Social Theory (2000) for instance, she identifies lived experience 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 fashion 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 top-down approach to Polhemus's bottom-up approach, which considers the influence of subcultural street styles. As Crane (2000) points out, fashion has become fragmented, so much so that trends may not only come from many sources but also coexist. Entwistle tackles this convoluted landscape with an interesting mix of tools, which are not often found together in one researcher's tool kit. She moves easily between the interactionally based theories of Blumer and the permutations of semiotic and postmodern significations, though she has little time for the latter and focuses mostly on Bourdieu, Callon, and Latour. Throughout the text we follow narratives and subnarratives, competing discourses of spatiality, materiality, and embodiment existing as constantly shifting nodes, interconnected, leading from notions of aesthetics to concepts, practices, places, markets, and objects inhabiting streams of culture and economy in which markets are embedded but at the same time are not fixed. In a sense, Entwistle wants to study how these systems align, hence the appeal of Blumer and Bourdieu, who approach such questions with certitude. Entwistle refuses to constrain her ideas in one format, so she opts for a multifaceted approach that celebrates complexity, variability, and contingency. Whether it is a pair of spring 2002 Seven For All Mankind jeans or the high-fashion model "look," the aesthetic marketplace and its contents are always in a state of fluctuation. Bourdieu and others are mined for useful notions, and then set aside. While Bourdieu manages to stop action in time and space, pinning it down for analysis, Entwistle finds the fruits of this approach conceptually useful but inadequate. For Entwistle the constant shift of reality is perhaps best approached through actor network theory (ANT). ANT, represented by the work of Latour, Callon, and Law, captures the incoherence of transient networks that reconfigure and have the ability to reflect new associations; for Entwistle they can even absorb the contradictory notions of agency and structure that she toys with, and with Bourdieu's field theory and notion of practice to which she returns to quite often, even after dismissing Bourdieu as "lazy."¹ We find in her work bursts of insight amid theoretical and empirical exploration. When trying to trace back how Entwistle started to speak of ANT, I consulted the index, which placed its origin on page 11. While there is some mention of Latour, there is no clear beginning; rather there is a long buildup to this commitment that continues throughout the book...