Designing Clothes

Culture and Organization of the Fashion Industry

Veronica Manlow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351522632
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Fashion is all around us: we see it, we buy it, we read about it, but most people know little about fashion as a business. Veronica Manlow considers the broader signifi cance of fashion in society, the creative process of fashion design, and how fashion unfolds in an organizational context where design is conceived and executed. To get a true insider's perspective, she became an intern at fashion giant Tommy Hilfi ger. Th ere, she observed and recorded how a business's culture is built on a brand that is linked to the charisma and style of its leader.

Fashion firms are not just in the business of selling clothing along with a variety of sidelines. Th ese companies must also sell a larger concept around which people can identify and distinguish themselves from others. Manlow defi nes the four main tasks of a fashion fi rm as creation of an image, translation of that image into a product, presentation of the product, and selling the product. Each of these processes is interrelated and each requires the eff orts of a variety of specialists, who are often in distant locations. Manlow shows how the design and presentation of fashion is infl uenced by changes in society, both cultural and economic. Information about past sales and reception of items, as well as projective research informs design, manufacturing, sales, distribution, and marketing decisions.

Manlow offers a comprehensive view of the ways in which creative decisions are made, leading up to the creation of actual styles. She helps to defi ne the contribution fashion fi rms make in upholding, challenging, or redefi ning the social order. Readers will fi nd this a fascinating examination of an industry that is quite visible, but little understood.

Part I

The Fashion Industry

1

Clothing, Fashion, and Society

The invention of symbolism was a crucial moment in the history of the human species. The ability to use symbols indicates an ability to think abstractly; when such symbols are created with artistic intent, they indicate the ability to appreciate “beauty.” Recently archeologists have discovered two ochre ornaments, engraved with geometrical symbols, at Blombos Cave in South Africa. These artifacts are more than 40,000 years older than the more advanced cave paintings found in France’s Grotte Chauvet (McFarling 2002: A1). These symbolic expressions are precursors to more complex representations found once social organization reached a more advanced phase.

Different aspects of the structure of appearance “are consciously manipulated to assert and demarcate differences in status, identity and commitment—for example (support or protest) at the level of personal, national and international relationships,” observes Hilda Kuper. She claims the “rules of that structure are assimilated over time together with other rules of thought and behavior,” and though they may have “received less analytical scrutiny, they are as ‘real’ as rules of kinship, of land tenure, of spatial interaction, or any other rules of social communication” (1973: 348-349). Similar claims of the importance of material culture—particularly clothing—in understanding society have been made in sociology by Georg Simmel, Herbert Blumer, Gregory Stone, Erving Goffman, and Fred Davis among many others.

Kuper (1973: 349) maintains that the term “clothing” should be used in an inclusive sense and differentiated further into “dress,” used on everyday occasions; “uniform,” used for ceremonial occasions; and “costume,” clothing with a mystical or sacred quality used for rituals/performances. Fashion is the term that should be used to refer to the modern manifestation of clothing. Stefania Saviolo and Salvo Testa (2002: 6) argue that the etymological connection between moda, the Italian word for fashion, and modern, is not pure chance. They quote an Italian author who says that “fashion is a universal principle, one of the elements of civilization and social custom” (2002: 5). As Christopher Breward (1995: 5) puts it, introducing commerce into his definition, fashion is “clothing designed primarily for its expressive qualities, related closely to the short-term dictates of the market.”

Clothing, then, is an important element of social life and consists of taking natural or synthetic materials and converting them into wearable items. The fabric and the cut of clothing enables or confines the body’s movement and causes the wearer to be received in a certain way. Clothing is both a material and a symbolic item made by human intervention. The question then is, who makes clothing and how does it receive its symbolic significance? Clothing, its management within the household, and its tailoring has been an essential aspect of “women’s work.” In poorer households, women made clothing for the men and children of the house as well as for themselves. In more affluent households, women were able to hire other women to make clothing. These dressmakers followed traditional patterns and did not introduce any radical innovations of style and manner into their designs.

Eventually these domestic arrangements, organized by women, were superseded by the emergence of clothing making as a “cottage” industry. This industry was organized according to the guild system; though individual tailors, seamstresses, and dressmakers too were to be found. In the guild system, a master-tailor for example, worked with a few apprentices and journeymen; the latter eventually emerging as masters in their own right. Another system for the production of clothing was the “putting out” or “out work” system in which a merchant-manufacturer would send materials to rural producers who would work in their homes. The finished garments were returned to the merchants, and the workers were paid on a piecework basis. The demand for skilled custom work existed alongside this cheaper, less skilled, and more exploitative form of labor (Gamber 1997: 87). Wendy Gamber (1997: 4-5) points out that many labor scholars assume that artisans and the apprentice system were exclusively male, and that once clothing was no longer a home enterprise women were excluded. Dressmakers, seamstresses, and milliners (more often than not) learned and practiced their skills in the workshop. Well into the twentieth century, women continued to provide custom services as well as work in factories.

Producing dresses, uniforms, and costumes in this manner eventually gave way to factories; though vestiges of the “putting-out” system remain in the “sweatshops” that some manufacturers use today. These clothing makers did not employ designers and did not typically make substantial changes in style to the clothing they produced. This form of mass production was best suited to the making of identical products with variations only in size.

These industries, owing to the emergence of more complex, class-based societies, grew into the fashion industry whose task it now was to produce not just clothing in the traditional sense but signs by which different and newly emerging classes, status groups, and parties could be distinguished. The latter word here describes organized structures of people seeking to exercise social and political power or influence, i.e., military systems, voluntary associations, religious orders, etc. The task of the fashion system was to provide clothing that was to be used to make distinctions between people on economic, cultural, aesthetic, and political levels. Once these signs were made available to make distinctions, they became accessible also to be used as signs of domination; people who could wear more expensive clothes, visibly more sumptuous, or rare items could dominate those who wore more ordinary clothes. Furs, silks, well-tailored clothes, or clothes with elite markers of one kind or another could trump cotton and ill-tailored clothes by anonymous makers.

To cater to the needs of the new elite who wanted signs of distinction (instruments which would legitimate their domination that had not been officially assigned to them) the fashion designer was born. It was his or her task to produce clothes that made it possible for wearers to distinguish themselves and dominate others—subtly or overtly. In creating these specialized clothes, designers drew themes from current cultural or historical sources and in effect became both creators of new cultural elements as well as disseminators of these items.

As the middle class expanded and found itself with disposable income, more people sought signs of distinction. Fashion designers took markers of elite status and adapted them to a mass audience providing, again, a means of domination through clothing; though this one was more symbolic than real. New markers of status, such as the logo, emerge providing a currency that can be easily read. Lou Taylor (2000: 137) refers to them as “talismanic symbols of glamour and desirability.” There is an irony here. As fashion becomes more “democratic,” by extending its reach to groups that were formerly excluded, it does not necessarily become less hierarchical. Fashion remains, despite its democratic embrace, a vehicle which marks distinctions and displays group membership or individuality. Many people are able to enter into the “game” of distinction, and the fashion cycle accelerates. Signs are commodified. Individuals are able to use these signs according to their own interests. As greater numbers of people are drawn into the democracy of fashion, there is a greater need for low wage laborers to work in this ever expanding system. These inherent contradictions, though, are not limited to fashion, but are also a feature of all industries that separate production from consumption and rely on just-in-time flexible production (Ross 1997: 15).

Fashion and clothing are a means of linking the individual to collective life—although in strictly differentiated ways. Giannino Malossi says of fashion products that they are “material goods with cultural content,” similar in many ways to “film, pop music, or software” (1998: 156). Clothing refers to “established patterns of dress” (Rubinstein 1995: 3). The cultural content of clothing then refers back to tradition. Certain types of clothing, such as the sari, are ethnically or religiously defined and socially regulated in response to a relatively fixed system of easily recognizable codes. In extreme cases no innovation may be allowed. Amongst the Amish, for instance, religious ideology demands an almost total uniformity. The sari, in terms of how it is worn and what kind of fabrics and designs are used, is often considered a garment that embodies caste prohibitions. Emma Tarlo (1996: 141-143, 149), an anthropologist who has studied Indian village women in Gujarat, seeks to extend established ideas about the straightforward relationship between clothing and caste. Instead, she points to the influence of diffusion among regional styles due primarily to marriage practices and trade; in the larger Indian context, she draws attention to the incorporation of elements of European dress (such as a blouse or jacket worn in addition to the sari) and the use of foreign fabric (e.g., synthetic materials) and patterns. Economic status and not caste, she argues, is more clearly expressed by the “fineness of fabric,” and sometimes by the amount of material used than by the style of the sari worn. In any case, she concludes that when “constrained by both caste and veiling restrictions few village women have more than one style of clothing from which to choose at any given time” (1996: 326). The sari can be compared to the tunic dress of ancient Egypt, the peplos in Greece, the Roman toga, and the Japanese kimono—all of which remained essentially unchanged for centuries (Lipovetsky 1994: 19). Douglas Gorsline (1952: 3), in discussing the clothing of the Egyptians, comments: “The ancient world was one in which the rulers, nobles, priestly castes, and warriors maintained themselves in absolute power over the great masses of people. It was thus a society in which one general style of clothing could survive for thousands of years.” For many Indian women today there will be a much freer range of choices not only in the sari but also among other forms of dress. Some Indian fashion designers have experimented with the sari in various ways, but mainly for the consumption of women outside of India. We can see in this example the incomplete transition between clothing and fashion—one moored in absolutes, the other variable—as well as fashion’s connection to modernity.

The Western suit and dress are prototypes of clothing that are much more responsive to the current ideas of appearance and the desire for novelty, and thus have fully become fashion. From these basic types emerge different forms: skirts, jeans, shorts; in turn these types are amenable to trends: miniskirts, “hot pants,” low-rise jeans, etc. In fashion, the end result may bear little resemblance to the clothing form from which it is derived. Fashion, unlike clothing, is amenable to reinterpretation. By nature it is unstable and therefore elusive. Fashion does not change, as clothing might, in response to diffusion or for practical reasons alone. It can change just for the sake of change.

Many scholars of fashion (e.g. Breward 1995; Hollander 1993; Lipovetsky 1994; Laver 2002) place its origin in the fourteenth century. Valerie Steele (1988) argues that fashion, as a system of variations in acceptable styles, can be traced to Italian cities in the early Renaissance. Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier, written in 1516, provides instruction on comportment for the Italian court. Castiglione presents a conversation on the issue of how the courtier should dress. Various fashions common to certain regions and dispositions are considered. The courtier is presented as having a choice in “what manner of man he wishes to be taken for.” Castiglione (1528/1959: 123) cites one Federico as saying: “a man’s attire is no slight index of the wearer’s fancy, although sometimes it can be misleading; and not only that, but ways and manners, as well as deeds and words, are all an indication of the qualities of the man in whom they are seen.” This is a shift from a system of dress based entirely on status to one in which the wearer begins to exert an influence on how he or she will be perceived. Saviolo and Testa (2002: 11) discuss an important catalyst in the “second acceleration” in the development of fashion in Europe: “The diffusion of rich merchants around Europe encouraged the creation of a new dressing code no longer conditioned by ostentation (the nobility and clergy), poverty (farmers), or usefulness (the army), but by the search for social legitimacy.”

Fashion—mode—exists fully only with the advent of modern cities where a connection to traditional culture has, at least, been partially severed. In the mid-fourteenth century, a decisive break with tradition occurred, explains Gilles Lipovetsky. The long flowing, generally unisex robe was exchanged for a short and fitted costume worn with tight fitting stockings for men, and a long and close to the body dress with a low neckline for women. These innovations spread throughout Western Europe between 1340 and 1350. Lipovetsky (1994: 20-21) states, “From this point on, one change followed another: variations in appearance were more frequent, more extravagant, more arbitrary.” He continues, “Change was no longer an accidental, rare, fortuitous phenomenon; it became a fixed law of the pleasures of high society.” Ruth P. Rubinstein (1995: 137-138) explains the birth of fashion within this society. As monarchs grew in power in the fourteenth century and commercial centers began to emerge, the conditions necessary for fashion were put into place. To demonstrate the power of the royal and princely courts under the rule of one man, elaborate ceremonies and rituals were orchestrated. The new social relations that arose called for new forms of dress different from those in feudal times. Noblemen were no longer masters in their own right, but servants of the king. Knighthood, which had to be earned through loyalty and not simply conferred, was in decline. As competition for patronage became necessary, it was particularly important to make an excellent impression which would justify movement to a higher status (1995: 143). The emergence of a town bourgeoisie in Burgundy, at the crossroads of the trade route with the East, created status competition with the nobility. One “almost literally” wore “one’s wealth on one’s back.” Amongst the aristocratic class there was a desire to be able to immediately distinguish between a prince and a merchant, while other classes wished such symbolic boundaries to be collapsed. Sumptuary laws would soon come into existence which forbade “commoners” from displaying “fabrics and styles that aristocracy sought to reserve for itself” (Davis 1992: 29, 58). Extravagance amongst the European aristocracy in the sixteenth century—the display and even the careless expenditure of wealth in the form of clothing, food, and other resources—was a means of displaying power. Once bourgeois men and women began to emulate the nobility it became necessary for the nobility to “invent new ‘guilded costumes’, or new distinctive signs.” Fernand Braudel, quoting a Sicilian passing through Paris in 1714, writes, “Nothing makes noble persons despise the gilded costume so much as to see it on the bodies of the lowest men in the world” (Braudel 1979: 324). Fashion in Europe in 1650 “was restricted to a small group of elite men and women who had the resources to invest in heavy, ornate garments made from costly silks and gold and silver brocade,” states Jennifer M. Jones. She continues, pointing out that the rest of the population “possessed an extremely limited wardrobe, comprising either coarse, homemade clothing or castoffs of the upper classes” (Jones 1994: 943). “To be ignorant of fashion was the lot of the poor the world over,” says Braudel (1979: 313). By the end of the eighteenth century, fashion extended further down the class hierarchy allowing more people to participate at least to some degree (Jones 1994: 943). This “pressure” from a growing pool of “followers and imitators obviously made the pace [of fashion] quicken” (Braudel 1979: 324).

Fashion, were it just superficial, wouldn’t have played so great a role in influencing human history and social organization; it would not have received serious attention from social theorists, both classical and modern. Fashion has been studied, if only incompletely, across many disciplines. Today, with its force as an industry and a culturally significant phenomena greatly increasing, more attention is being directed to the study of fashion. Within the social sciences, fashion has been approached theoretically in five main ways: fashion as an instrument for creating and maintaining boundaries in society, fashion in the interactional process, fashion as a semiotic system, fashion as a capitalist tool, and fashion as a postmodern condition.

Gabriel Tarde, Thorstein Veblen, and Georg Simmel did not treat fashion as a superficiality; rather they believed it had a particular logic that could be understood scientifically (Ortoleva 1998: 61). Veblen and Simmel focused on fashion as a means of supporting the social structure of the elites (Rubinstein 2001: 3841). Up until the twentieth century, Rubinstein (2001: 3844) explains, the attempt by the middle and lower classes to enhance their status through fashionable attire was seen as a violation of the social order. Neither fashion nor its imitation exists in caste societies, says Jean Baudrillard (2000). Fashion is “born with the Renaissance, with the destruction of the feudal order by the bourgeois order and the emergence of overt competition at the level of signs of distinction.” In this previous social order Baudrillard argues, “signs are protected by a prohibition which ensures their total clarity and confers an unequivocal status on each” (2000: 50). Signs become arbitrary when sumptuary laws and communal prohibitions no longer hold sway; once “emancipated” they become accessible to “any and every class” (2000:51).

Simmel, considered by many to be the first academic to seriously analyze fashion (Lehmann 2000: 127), combines both societal and individual factors in explaining fashion. Simmel (1904/1971: 301) sees fashion principally as a product of the social demands of modern life. Says Simmel, “Segregation by means of differences in clothing, manners, taste, etc. is expedient only where the danger of absorption and obliteration exists.”

Although fashion may be seen as a symptom of modern society, its roots in the two antagonistic principles, as Simmel (1904/1971: 294-295) describes them, reach back to a more fundamental source. If this tendency were not part of the human condition, advancement would not be possible Simmel argues. Simmel explains the essential mechanics of fashion:

Fashion is the imitation of a given example and satisfies the demand for social adaptation; it leads the individual upon the road which all travel, it furnishes a general condition, which resolves the conduct of every individual into a mere example. At the same time it satisfies in no less degree the need of differentiation, the tendency toward dissimilarity, the desire for change and contrast, on the one hand by a constant change of contents, which gives to the fashion of today an individual stamp as opposed to that of yesterday and of to-morrow, on the other hand because fashions differ for different classes—the fashions of the upper stratum of society are never identical with those of the lower; in fact they are abandoned by the former as soon as the latter prepares to appropriate them (1904/1971: 296).

Indeed, sumptuary laws were an attempt to curtail the desire for social advancement by those who did not inherit the station in life to which they might aspire.

Simmel would argue that a dialectical relationship exists in fashion. An individual feels the need to conform and in this way a certain mode of self-presentation is imposed, yet he or she also wishes to be distinguished from others as an individual. This essential tension between imitation and differentiation constitutes fashion. Fashion allows for the expression of these two oppositional tendencies. Modern society too is driven by its logic of change. Lehmann (2000: 201) states: “Most significant for fashion is its ephemeral, transient, and futile character, which changes with every season. This insubstantiability with regard to linear progress, as well as fashion’s marginal position in the cultural spectrum, appealed especially to those who considered the fragment particularly expressive for modern culture.”

Simmel’s (1904/1971: 300) trickle-down theory posits that styles are set by the elite in order that they may differentiate themselves as a class. Emulation by the lower classes drives innovation in fashion in order that social distinctions might be maintained. Simmel points out that the “mingling of classes and the leveling effect of democracy exert a counter-influence.” Indeed, since Simmel wrote we find many instances of fashion “bubbling-up” from the working-classes, the “street,” and from various subcultures—the foremost among them being youth subcultures (Hebdige 1979; Polhemus 1994). Some earlier examples can also be found. James Laver (2002: 77-79) attributes the slashed look, the practice of cutting slits in a garment so that the lining would be exposed, to the victory of the Swiss over Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, in 1476. The Swiss troops used lavish silk and other fabrics they had confiscated to patch their tattered garments. The fashion spread to German mercenaries and was eventually adopted by the French Court. Lavar says that this fashion, predominantl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Part I—The Fashion Industry
• Part II—Tommy Hilfiger USA, Inc.: A Case Study
• References
• Index