and involvement, ‘a willingness to undertake extreme work’ (Ekman, 2015), passion, insecurity, long and extreme working hours, self-entrepreneurship as well as sporadic project-oriented employment here and there (e.g. Eikhof and Haunschild, 2006; Fine, 2004; Moeran, 2009), these features are certainly shaping many fashion realities. Plenty has already been written about the individual fashion designer (e.g. da Costa Soares, 2011; Larner and Molloy,
2009; McRobbie, 1998: Volonté, 2012), and the literature frequently portrays the designer as a heroic, mythical and ideological construct preferably working in the exclusive salons of Parisian haute couture (or in another powerful, preferably Western fashion city25). In much of the recent fashion literature (see
e.g. Park, 1998; Schlermer, 2010), the individual designer is often fetishized in a manner that eventually neglects the many other human and non-human agents, surprising actions and relations crucially present in organizing ‘for’ fashion. Fashion literature has arguably tended to focus on the glamorous, exciting, ’exotic’ and self-expressive aspects of fashion production and its ‘individualized’ presentation in favour of its everyday motives and actions, dullness, routines, failures, manual labour, repetition and monotony. ‘[I]n today’s fashion, the focus is less on the actual clothing or its manufacturing process, but rather, on the designer who can produce and reproduce a glamorous, attractive image to the consumers’, Kawamura (2005, 64) exemplifies.
There seems to be something of a ‘cult’ of the individual present in much of the fashion literature; we are all familiar with iconic designers such as Coco Chanel, Alexander McQueen, Vivianne Westwood, Miuccia Prada, Donatella Versace, Martin Margiela, Cristobal Balenciaga, Rei Kawakubo, Karl Lagerfeld or Rick Owens. We encounter these stars in a variety of media representations and popular accounts. Of course, the ‘cult’ of the individual as an ideological construct is apparent in other contexts, and it maps onto other literatures, as well. For instance, I think of the popular management and leadership literature, in particular, where the individual leader has long been largely fetishized. This fetish surrounding the individual seems to apply to the ‘heroic figurehead of capitalism’ (Williams and Nadin, 2013, 552) in entrepreneurship literature, too (see Armstrong, 2005; Jones and Spicer, 2005; Rehn, Brännback, Carsrud and Lindahl, 2013 for a critique). Taken together, it appears suffice to say that we are drawn to narratives about heroic individuals and idealized portrayals that risk lacking correspondence to ‘real life practices’ (Drucker, 1985, 127). More specifically, we are drawn to entrepreneurial dreams, success stories and fantasies rather than routines, repetition, happenstances, mistakes or failures. Perhaps, it is still difficult for us to think of actual, unromantic and ‘failing’ entrepreneurs
25 Arguably, the majority of the literature on fashion remains culturally specific, bordering on ethnocentric (e.g. Moearan 2015; Wilson 2007).
beyond the fantasy of the heroic entrepreneur. Perhaps this apparent fascination with heroic individuals is typical for our time and is part of our human desire to reduce complexity, collectivity and mess to more simple and less comprehensive representations. Perhaps it is largely perceived as difficult and uncomfortable to attempt to go beyond a polished surface. However, we need to explore what images of heroic individuals signify beyond and behind their surfaces.
In this thesis, I try to move away from the narrow focus on the individual designer and his or her doings. Specifically, I believe overemphasizing and even celebrating the doings of a ‘successful’ single ‘star’ designer or what is ‘in’ the designer’s head is hugely problematic. To illustrate complex everyday life and more deeply understand how designers organize (creatively) for fashion therefore requires a broader approach to fashion as a collective, mundane, repetitive and relational phenomenon. By exploring a fascinating world constructed on the
margins of what is dominantly positioned as hyped, exciting or ‘ultra fashionable’,
my intention is to demystify the spell around the individual, and reposition fashion studies closer to the less idealized. It is, as previously discussed, not in the hands of the individual designer to create what is later recognized as fashion, and valued by others. Designers struggle to navigate complexity in their attempts to create long-term fashion value in a plurality of different ways.
Today, we are often said to live in an era of change, where many taken-for- granted fashion roles are changing (e.g. Bhardwaj and Fairhurst, 2010; Collinson, 2015). For example, the rise of influential fashion and street style blogs have shown us how bloggers and consumers have become powerful fashion curators, rejecting, dictating and co-producing fashions, acting as sartorial role models, sharing trends and doing commercial collaborations (see e.g. Pedroni, 2015; Rocamora, 2011; Titton, 2015). Also, emerging bloggers with huge social media presences sometimes become actual designers (for example Elin Kling for H&M, Garance Doré for Kate Spade or Rumy Neely for Forever 21). Today, formally educated designers with degrees from prestigious institutions are perhaps no longer necessarily the undisputed ‘stars’ in the spotlight (Meadows, 2012). If ’anyone’ can design today, what does it mean for the reputation, pride and professional identity of a fashion designer?
Perhaps the success of a designer or a fashion label at any given time and space not only depends on the creative, emerging and sometimes totally random bundling and marshalling of resources, but also on how well the fashion
bricoleur manages to continuously negotiate, balance and perform this particular tension. In this thesis, I address the interesting observation that a designer needs to make noise and perform – to others – in order to stand out and be seen. Performativity and camp seem to go hand in hand – and with fashion. The notion of performance has been theoretically and critically approached in a variety of academic fields. Here, I view performing as deliberate, sometimes exaggerated, (physically) staged or somehow socially played forms of organized action in movement (Schechner, 2006). Especially since the 1990s, critical research has elaborated on Judith Butler’s (1988; 1990; 1993; 1998; 2004) construct and theory of performativity as the repetition of stylized acts that are simultaneously ‘intentional and performative’ (1988, 522). Specifically, Butler’s (2004) work advances our understanding of subjectivity. To me, the subject position of the fashion designer is evidently no stable construct. Rather, this position is shifting, relationally ‘done, undone and re-done’ (Pecis, 2016, 7) in the everyday interactions among people and materiality in a specific socio- cultural context. The position of the designer is also situated, both culturally and historically (e.g. Ashcraft, 2006; Bruni and Gherardi, 2001; Gherardi, 1995; Pullen, 2006), and I must avoid ‘fixing’ this fleeting position in my own writing (Riach, Rumens and Tyler, 2016).
Feminist researchers have been especially critical of how gender is performed in contemporary organizations, and how gendered norms are reproduced in and through acts of organizing (Pecis, 2016). Building upon insight from this critical perspective, fashion and its performance are also reproduced through culturally and historically situated acts (see also Ashcraft, 2006; Bruni and Gherardi, 2001; Pullen, 2006). In this sense, one ‘becomes’ (or not) a fashion designer through a series of receptive and stylized acts that are carried out in a specific spatiotemporal context. To Butler, gender is not only done through interactions (West and Zimmerman, 1987), but under the constant influence of societal norms, expectations and discourses. These shape the doing and undoing of the (gender) performance in any spatio-temporal context (Pecis, 2016). Evidently, this insight seems relevant for the fashionable world. There are plenty of imperatives, norms, authorities and ‘regimes’ that the fashion designer continually needs to consider, relate to, perhaps overcome, and even trick, in order to perform for others. Meanwhile, these norms ‘reproduce’ the performative constitution of the designer subjectivity. To Butler (2004), there
is no pre-existing subject. Rather, gendered identities take form through a repetition of (embodied) acts: individual subjects are not born gendered but ‘become’ gendered through their acts. Building upon these assumptions further, someone ‘becomes’ a fashion designer through the repetition of intentional and performative acts in the context in which they are produced.
The spatio-temporal context, then, is influenced by multiple processes both in the place of origin and that of destination (Pecis, 2016). This links to Butler’s (1990, 3) insight about gender: it is ‘impossible to separate out “gender” from the political and cultural intersections in which it is inevitably produced and maintained’. Interestingly, the fashion designer continuously needs to perform in his or her everyday life and ‘keep up appearance’ despite often working from the harsh realities of ‘low budget’ or ‘no budget’ (Huopalainen, 2015, 2016). Pecis’ (2016) study on gender in innovation processes shows us how these processes are ‘corporeal, discursive and practical’ in an intertwined sense. I would suggest something similar for processes of organizing fashion, and I will illustrate this ongoing performance empirically. Finally, fashion is about ‘commerce, culture and identity in a particular (post)-modern formation on the runway’, Evans (2001, 304) once suggested. Here, I assume that Evans regards the entire world as our performative runway. In what follows, I turn to bricolage, another crucial theoretical concept in this thesis.
This chapter explores bricolage, a notion widely used across various practices and academic disciplines. Specifically, I discuss conceptions of bricolage over times and spaces in order to establish my own approach to this dynamic notion. Here, I position bricolage as a form of organizing where embodiment and socio-materiality intertwine, a kind of practice ‘within practice’. In order to better understand real-life ‘creation in the making’ and spatial organizing in action in deep and nuanced ways, this chapter argues that a contemporary, critical and dynamic approach to bricolage needs to include affect, embodiment, materiality and spatiality in its wider scope and definition. Specifically, I argue that these perform crucial yet under-theorized dimensions in existing bricolage theory and practice. Considered together, a more critically informed approach to bricolage is relevant for illuminating the emergent, embodied and relational everyday qualities of organizing, and matters to us if we want to understand bricolage in deeper, more nuanced and situated ways.