Local Culture?

The media’s portrayal of fashion promotes the intensification of trans-cultural fashion interactions and promotes a consciousness that sees the world as a single place of fashion (Robertson 1992:6). Although processes of hybridisation provide an antidote to claims of inevitable homogenising globalism, for ideas to hybridise there must be an initial difference to produce their blending. Yet the extent to which dress practices are locally defined is open to question. Craik (1994) argues that dress acts spatially to articulate a relation between the body and the cultural milieu, so that it becomes a technique of establishing place-identity. McDowell (1994:159), in contrast, emphasises that local preferences are complexly interwoven with global style trends: ‘identity is not place specific ... style is cosmopolitan, not local’. Whether places have characteristic dress patterns depends on historical and social circumstances. Breward (1995), for example, contends that dress preferences are grounded in memories, which implies a strong link to place.

In this context, however, Australia can be viewed as a fertile ground on which to cultivate ‘global’ fashion interests because, as a young nation founded on migration, it

does not have a strong national ‘memory’ to frame its cultural identity. Milner (1991:116), for example, views Australia as a cultural tabula rasa:

… Australia has been catapulted towards post-industrialism at a speed possible only in a society that had never been fully industrialised; toward consumerism in a fashion barely imaginable in historically less affluent societies; towards an aesthetic populism unresisted by any indigenous experience of a seriously adversarial high culture…

Despite state-sponsored attempts in the late 1980s to develop Australian nationhood through the creation of a distinctively Australian fashion sensibility, ‘Australian’ fashion remains more image than substance (Maynard 2001). Australia’s small cohort of fashion designers focuses their efforts at the global scale, with an eye to international markets. Their use of design to establish an Australian identity is a reductive strategy which seeks to differentiate their styles in the landscapes of global fashion.24 Overtly ‘Australian’ stylistic elements are seldom encountered.25

It’s a nonsense that people … [have local preferences] people wear the same stuff everywhere. Fashion trends are pretty similar ... we are not seeing a great divergence in what’s successful here and what’s successful in Singapore. Our top 10 is their top 10 … we copy what they do.

Interview HK17

Moreover, Australian fashion designers themselves do not view Australian fashion as separate from the global:

It’s now a global market-place and there is no such thing as Australian fashion.

Fashion designer Lisa Ho, in Owens (2001)

24 _{Carla Zampatti designs, which are targeted to tourist and export markets, conjure a tangible} link to ‘Australia’ though the incorporation of the colours used in Aboriginal dot paintings. Jacobs (1996) discusses of the use of Aboriginal art in the construction of Australian identity. 25 _{It could be argued that some surf and ski wear has an explicitly Australian character, but such} a move is tautological because it requires ‘Australia’ to be defined in terms of surfing cultures.

Nevertheless, there is some evidence of distinctively Australian preferences. Fashion magazine writers distinguish routinely qualitative differences between ‘Australian’, ‘New York’ and ‘European’ fashion as though each contains a distinctive identity.26 Mass marketers also perceive place-based differences:

There are definite differences ... We sell in Australia and New Zealand. There is no doubt that the New Zealanders that shop with us are more fashionable than the Australians that shop with us. There is no doubt that the New Zealanders are more European in their tastes and Australians are very much West Coast USA in their tastes. I don’t think that’s just how the vibes go … that’s just the way I think it really is.

Interview AU02

Furthermore, industry experts in other parts of world are comfortable differentiating styles that would appeal in the Australian market. In the quotation below, the Hong Kong trader was explaining that Australia follows the global trend in most cases, but with exceptions:

Sometimes the style from Europe or America is not fashionable in the Australian market … sometimes you have to design new style.

Interview HK16

Numerous overseas clothing firms have failed in the Australian market because Australian purchasers rejected their styles.27 Similarly, many local firms succeed, despite their poor economies of scale, by gauging accurately local fashion whims. These examples suggest that Australian consumers have distinctive preferences, but that those preferences are difficult to make explicit or to codify.

At the same time, the idea of distinctively ‘Australian’ dress is undermined by differences in dress practices at the sub-national as well as the sub-cultural levels.

26 _{This may reflect national differences in posture and demeanour — Americans ‘swagger’, the} British ‘scuttle’, while Australians ‘slouch’ — which makes the same garments look different in different national contexts (Maynard 2001).

27 _{Examples of such failures are Wooltru’s sourcing for Sportsgirl, also Marks and Spencers’} and Liz Claiborne’s forays into the Australian market.

Given the diversity of cultural backgrounds of Australian citizens, ‘Australian’ dress sensibilities are likely to be diffused, differentiated and activated through sub-cultural groups. Sub-cultural fashion differences are well documented (Hebdige 1987, Mort 1996), and in this context ‘Australian’ resistance to global fashion trends might be expressed only through distinctive local interpretations of global trends within sub- cultural group dress practices.28 At the sub-national level, Whitlock (2003) describes the different fashion orientations between cities within Australia by relating fashion style, especially colour selection, to geography through differences in climate and the quality of light in different places. In addition to culturally-specific associations between colours and emotions, place-specificity in garment preferences is created because people in places have different colourings and skin tones, which suit some fabrics and colours more than others.29 This implies the existence of local rather than national fashion preferences.

Ma (1999:5) provides a different perspective on the relation between local and global information flows by viewing the reception of media messages as differing between places depending on how their production and reception by audiences is interlinked and embedded in local socio-political configurations. If he is correct, there could well be a national ‘Australian’ fashion system without there necessarily being an identifiable Australian culture, since the local fashion system could generate an identity from the complexities of its unique regulatory context.

If distinctively Australian style preferences exist, it is likely that they are not uniform, are rarely explicit, and are not framed in opposition to global fashion ideas. Rather, they are linked complexly to place-specific contexts, including regulatory and business structures, to climatic conditions and to demographic characteristics. As a result, there are few opportunities for locals to subvert overtly the power of designer fashion styles promoted by the fashion media.

28 _{For example, if Australian surfers began wearing ‘shorter’ board-shorts.}

29 _{For example, the pastel tones of traditional English knitwear do not complement sun-} damaged Australian complexions. The colour red denotes luck in Asia but sexual availability in Australia.