British Fashion Design

Rag Trade or Image Industry?

Angela McRobbie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134932436
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

British Fashion Design explores the tensions between fashion as art form, and the demands of a ruthlessly commercial industry. Based on interviews and research conducted over a number of years, Angela McRobbie charts the flow of art school fashion graduates into the industry; their attempts to reconcile training with practice, and their precarious position between the twin supports of the education system and the commercial sector. Stressing the social context of cultural production, McRobbie focuses on British fashion and its graduate designers as products of youth street culture, and analyses how designers from diverse backgrounds have created a labour market for themselves, remodelling `enterprise culture` to suit their own careers.

1
FASHION DESIGN AND CULTURAL PRODUCTION

DESIGNER TIMES

The seeds for this study were first sown in 1989, at the end of the so-called ‘designer decade’ when a collection of articles, many of which had appeared throughout that decade in the political magazine Marxism Today, were published in a volume entitled New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s, edited by Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques (Hall and Jacques 1989). I was immediately interested in a short comment made by Robin Murray, ‘There are now 29,000 people working in design consultancies in the United Kingdom, which have sales of £1,600 million per annum. They are the engineers of designer capitalism’ (Murray 1989: 44). It struck me at the time that very little, if anything, was known about the working lives or careers of this kind of worker. In addition, I was slightly puzzled by the immediate equation Murray made between being a designer and designing for capitalism. The designers I knew personally, including the fashion designers, rarely saw themselves in this way. The extent to which notions of art, creativity and culture intruded upon and defined their practices as designers produced, at the very least, a sense of tension between themselves and the world of business. Clearly there are many different types of ‘designer’, from the art directors of the big advertising agencies for whom designing is indeed about selling commodities, to the small scale fashion designer for whom design work often seems to be at odds with what the market wants, to people like the graphic designer, Neville Brody, whose work throughout the 1980s could be seen in magazines like The Face and the left wing New Socialist. Figures like Brody and designers like, for example, Pam Hogg, seemed to me to be more ambivalently poised in relation to working for capitalism and it was this tension which I wanted to explore in greater depth.

There was also an underlying political motive in pursuing a study of fashion designers, as a case study of the ‘new cultural worker’. Left-wing thinking at the time was only able to interpret this kind of work in one of two ways. The first argued that these were ‘Thatcher’s children’, prime examples of the ‘enterprise culture’, who would fufil the Tory dreams of rebuilding British society along highly individualist lines. These would be self-reliant young men and women who would literally embody the virtues of ‘going it alone’ and ‘fending for yourself without the support of the ‘Nanny State’. For the left, people like these could only be seen as Tory supporters, new anti-union ‘Yuppies’, deeply intertwined and committed to the consumer culture for whom they provided the fancy wrapping paper. In contrast, the second approach suggested instead that they were simply fodder. They had been fed the jargon of enterprise and the joys of ‘being your own boss’ and then shoved into the cold and left to fend for themselves and, as a result, were working longer hours than even a nineteenth century employer could expect of his workforce. More fool them! These would be the middle class or professional equivalent of the newly casual and flexible workers described by Anna Pollert as being encouraged repeatedly during this period to ‘live with insecurity and learn to love it’ (Pollert 1988:72). Neither of these characterisations seemed to me to be convincing or adequate as accounts of the ‘cultural intermediaries’ who were entering, or rather, creating their own labour market throughout this decade.

My interest in providing a fuller account of these kinds of careers was motivated by both a sociological and a political concern. The absence of documentation of this kind of work in sociology or in cultural studies meant that political commentary was inevitably speculative. My reservations about consigning such workers to the camp of the new right, and thus ignoring them as potential allies, were based on a commitment on my part to attempting to build political bridges and draw different kinds of workers into the political processes, something that seemed all the more urgent in the face of the strong right wing government of the time, and the dwindling impact of the left (McRobbie 1996a). But the experience of teaching students who would become part of this creative workforce also led me to rather different conclusions from the mainstream left. In practice they showed few signs of embracing the language of Thatcherism (McRobbie 1996b).
Although their education and social identities did, by and large, give them a more individualist outlook (not unusual for arts or media students) than their 1960s or 1970s counterparts who were more thoroughly ‘subjectivised’ by the statist discourses of ‘the social’ and by the prospect of careers in the public sector, this did not turn them into rampant Thatcherites. Many came from disadvantaged social backgrounds, some were gay or lesbian. There was also an increasing flow of young people from different ethnic backgrounds into higher education, particularly into the new universities and the art colleges throughout the 1980s.

All the experiences we now associate with the social dislocation of Britain in the late 1970s and 1980s had also made some impact upon these young people. They grew up in different types of families, and were certainly not going to be party to the demonisation of single mothers conducted by the Tory press during this time. Many had parents who were unemployed and were unlikely to work again, others were struggling with the difficulties of coming out as gay or lesbian. In every respect, the old structures of support which in the past determined many of the patterns of people’s lives had faded away and so self-reliance was more of a survival strategy than a political statement. Most significant, in retrospect, was the sheer determination on the part of the young women whom I taught during this period to make careers for themselves and find ways of being economically independent, without having to depend in the future upon a male breadwinner. Indeed, many of the careers charted in this book are the fruits of this kind of effort, and are indicative of a labour market being produced from virtually nothing by young women designers who were part of a first generation of full-time female workers for whom a career of whatever sort would now be for life. The great irony is that just as this process comes underway, jobs for life are becoming a thing of the past. The various attempts at self-employment on the part of the designers I interviewed were therefore doubly significant in so far as they brought together these changing dynamics of both gender and employment.

Even amongst my own generation of women, educated in the 1960s, the idea of working and earning a living becoming an absolute necessity did not exist (but now in the 1990s, with so many marriages ending in divorce with dire financial consequences for women, I am regularly surprised to discover how many of my old schoolmates are, in fact, full-time housewives, and this idea now seems like such an anachronism). So, in debate with some of the old Marxist Left, for whom the dreams and aspirations of their design and media studies students to be successful and to have rewarding careers were so much self-illusion, I wanted to introduce a gender dimension as well as a note of political realism.

‘We are just sending out cannon fodder’, said one academic, ‘it s like the battle of the Somme. They leave with big ideas of being film directors, or fashion designers, and they get mown down within a couple of years!’. This, of course, emphasises the old notion of ‘false consciousness’, that students are seduced in this case, by the ideological offensive of Thatcherism, have no real understanding of their position as workers, eschew trade unionism, and then come to grief. This kind of comment poured scorn upon the enthusiasm and hard work of the exstudents I knew who were struggling to make a living for themselves in a way in which they found rewarding. And, if this was laced by glamour or fantasy, I wanted to argue with the old, puritan Left that these were hardly crimes, nor did they make these young workers automatically enemies of the Left. Much of the work in this book is aimed at producing a more complex and informed account of the new creative workforce.

The New Times collection was refreshing in its suggestion of moving beyond these old positions. It asked how the Left should respond to the enormous changes which had taken place in British society over the previous decade and under the political leadership of Mrs Thatcher. There was a clear sense that familiar theories needed to be revised. The Left had to shake itself up and plug in more successfully to what people wanted and to what it was that made Mrs Thatcher so popular.
More specifically, there was the recognition that Britain had become a more fluid society. It seemed as if various different social groups had become unanchored from their traditional moorings in the class structure. Class still provided an overall map of opportunities, expectations and outcomes, it still worked as a macrostructure of lifechances, but it was also a moving macro-structure, as were the other positionings of gender, generation, ethnicity and sexuality. These shifts were most vividly charted in changes in the economy and in work and patterns of employment, and the writers of the New Times acknowledged how these changes ‘collided’ with the growth of popular consumption and the rise of the service sector as a place of work.

The 1980s saw the retail revolution transform the British high street. This was symbolised, as several writers since then have noted, by the success of the Next chain, which brought fashion with a higher design input within the reach of average income consumers, male and female (Mort 1996, Nixon 1996). The availability of more differentiated goods, together with what appeared to be a more carefully designed appearance, reinforced the process of social fragmentation as tastes proliferated, and people strove to be different through the access they appeared to have to a wider range of goods. Even low income groups began participating more noticeably in this leisure field where individuals were invited or prevailed upon to ‘invent themselves’ in different ways as a mark of individuality, a sign of identity. As Stuart Hall very recently noted, young black people, ‘with hardly a penny in their pockets’, paraded the streets in demonstrations of spectacular consumption (Hall 1997). As Baudrillard argued, consumption had achieved a new prominence simultaneously with the way that culture and the media were now focal points in people’s lives (Baudrillard 1988). Suddenly everything seemed to become more cultural. This was as true for the single mum who would deprive herself in order to be able to buy some of the goods seen by her children on television, as it was for the more affluent working classes. For young people themselves, in the poorest areas, consumption was often accomplished through illicit means. The 1980s gave rise to new forms of hidden economy, from weekend street markets, to working ‘off the cards’, to handling stolen goods, drug dealing and, increasingly, working in and around the emergent club scene.

The New Times’ writers attributed the availability of designer goods to the growth of Post-Fordism (in response to global competition and saturated markets) and the application of new technology to the production of more differentiated goods. Flexible specialisation in production boosted flagging consumption by bringing niche marketed goods made in short runs to more discerning consumers. The people who were responsible for the higher input of quality and symbolic content in the new products were the designers and, while the traditional manufacturing workforce was slimmed down, there was a growth in this new branch of the service sector, the creative professionals. This, in turn, fed directly into the new kind of society in which we now live, where we are more likely to consume images of things than the actual objects or products to which they refer. The expanded market for images has created the need for a new workforce of image makers and, once again, the cultural intermediaries step in to play this role. The New Times, however, stops short of asking the question of who the cultural intermediaries actually are, what precisely they do, and what the conditions of their labour are?

By taking fashion designers as a case study, this book goes some way towards answering these questions but it also, in two respects, follows the lead set by Nixon (Nixon 1993, 1996). In his account of the growth of the market for male products during this same period he comments upon the ambivalent position occupied by the editor and founder of The Face magazine, Nick Logan. He is, argues Nixon, a ‘committed entrepreneur’, not the kind of ‘gung-ho’ capitalist championed by Mrs Thatcher but rather a product of the British working-class youth cultures of the late 1960s for whom values, other than simply profit and the market, influenced how he set himself up in the magazine business (Nixon 1993). In the case of The Face magazine, now very successful but still run on a shoestring, as we will see in chapter 10, this meant spurning the revenue from advertising in favour of retaining editorial independence and freedom in order to develop a new kind of magazine. Nixon does not pursue further the particular qualities of being a ‘committed entrepreneur’ though the term does suggest some social, cultural or even ethical dimension.

The socio-cultural dynamics of the particular brand of enterprise culture pursued by the fashion designers forms one strand in the current study, though it does remain uncertain how exactly they are positioned in relation to labour and capital. There is a sense in which they represent both and neither of these poles, so fluid and precarious are their careers in the enterprise culture. They share with Nick Logan a commitment to artistic or cultural integrity over the values of the market-place but, trained in the fine art tradition, they do not have the same entrepreneurial vision. Their enterprise comes more from necessity and the experience of unemployment. There were few ‘proper’ jobs in fashion design in the mid- and late 1980s and so the newly emerging fashion designers created their own jobs on the strength of dole payments, then the Enterprise Allowance Scheme (EAS), and with the help of a sewing machine, a few stretches of fabric and access to a stall or unit at Camden Lock or one of the other city centre markets. I was interested in how these small scale cultural entrepreneurs fitted into the occupational map of the Left (and indeed of contemporary sociology). How do we allocate them a class position? What does the future of work hold for them? I have already alluded to the role of youth culture and will return to it shortly, but a second feature of Nixon’s work, his explorations of movements in the new economy of culture, also shapes the present inquiry (Nixon 1996). This was broached by Stuart Hall when he wrote ‘Culture has ceased…to be a decorative addendum to the “hard world” of production and things, the icing on the cake of material culture…the material world of commodities and technologies is profoundly cultural’ (Hall 1988:128).

Hall’s comment indicates a realignment of relations between the cult ural and the economic. No longer can the economic be understood as existing in some pure state, untainted by the cultural and the symbolic and providing a kind of bottom line from which all cultural phenomena develop. Nixon argues that economic decisions are, in fact, increasingly rendered in cultural discourse, that cultural knowledge wielded by the creative professi onals actively produces new economies. The account of these realignments which are quite fundamental to contemporary society, is directed in Nixon’s work ultimately towards the new products, the launching of the new man as a potential market and also as a dynamic feature of consumer culture. In this book, the emphasis is instead on the livelihoods of the cultural producers and the micro-economies they bring into being. As we will see, in the field of fashion design economic issues are continually subordinated to creative or cultural priorities, producing what Bourdieu has called a kind of ‘anti-economy’ (Bourdieu 1993b). But this does not mean that designers do not think about cash-flows and earning a living. Far from it, it is rather that they rationalise their own economic fragility by seeing their market failure as a sign of artistic success, or at least artistic integrity.

Bourdieu argues that this display of economic ‘disinterest’ is actually a strategy for longer term success as an artist which requires short term sacrifice in the name of ‘no sell out’ to commercial opportunities. But the model Bourdieu proposes depends upon the ‘rarity of the producer’ (Bourdieu 1993a). What happens, I ask, when so many young people are being trained in art schools and pursue artistic careers of some description after graduation? The designers whom I interviewed all perceived themselves as artists. But Bourdieu’s model of artists spurning the market and disavowing the need to earn a living, as a kind of symbolic investment, a testimony to the purity of their motives, does not quite tally with the enormous expansion of the cultural economy which is full of ‘struggling artists’ who are becoming simply another part of the low pay, casual economy. This points to another, rather different, relation between culture and economy, one which I hope at least to unravel in the following pages.

Various other writers have called either for renewed emphasis to be paid to the complex economies of culture and to the ‘interplay between the symbolic and the economic’ (Murdock 1997a: 68) or they have commented on the way in which ‘the connections among the political, the social and the cultural are in movement —both in society and in our heads’ (Hartwig 1993:4). This book provides a concrete example of some of these shifts and processes. In fact, its origin predates the 1989 appearance of the New Times and draws extensively upon what might be called the Hall tradition. By this I mean the particular convergence of themes and issues which have characterised the work of Stuart Hall, and the cultural studies tradition which has developed around these interests. Inevitably there is a lot more to Hall’s work than those elements on which I choose to focus here. However, the general frame provided by Hall is characterised precisely by its continuing attempt to connect sociological and cultural analysis with the political transformation of British society in the post-war years. From the Gramscian-inspired analysis of working-class youth cultures in the mid-1970s, through the account of the ideological groundwork carried out by the popular press and media in the years running up to the Tory victory of 1979, there has been a persistent attempt in Hall’s work to draw upon ‘theory’ with a view to making full use of it in political analysis, or as Grossberg puts it, to ‘allow you to re-describe the context that poses the political challenge’ (Hall and Jefferson 1976, Hall et al. 1978, Grossberg 1997:291).

The political challenge underlying this book was posed by Britain ten years after the election to power of the Tories in 1979, when there seemed to be no end in sight to the successes of Thatcherism. Writing about the emergence of a new occupational strata, in this case the young fashion designers who had graduated from art school in the mid-1980s, it was tempting to pursue a pathway which depicted these young workers as merely the product of the inexorable logic of capital, a version of the ‘nation of shopkeepers’ which Mrs Thatcher herself was keen to promote through her commitment to ‘enterprise culture’. Hall’s influence can be seen, I suggest, in the way I have argued that these ‘disciplinary regimes’ cannot completely dictate their own outcomes. The young workers who emerge from the other side of ‘enterprise’ are, in this book, as much positioned by other previous or accompanying formations such as that provided by virtue of their race, or sexuality or family background or even by their working class identities, as they are by the apparently dominant discourse of the ‘enterprising self. These jostle with each other, producing something other than a group of young cultural workers who could simply be described as ‘Thatcher’s children’. Yet the political challenge is that they do not fit, either in their occupational positioning as self-employed, or indeed as cultural entrepreneurs and small employers, with existing Left vocabularies. Hall’s influence resides, I suggest, in the way he tends to stop short at fully endorsing the determinist version of history whereby all social and political phenomena are the outcome of the workings of the ideological apparatus or the products of the power of the ‘subjectivising discourses’. As he puts it, the system is always more ‘leaky’ than these models permit. It produces its own failures as well as successes.

I have chosen to interpret this particular kind of workforce through the history and development of youth culture and popular culture in post-war Britain, not in isolation but rather as they intersect with education, in particular the art school, and with the commercial mass media, and also more dramatically with the growth of what Schwengell has called the Kulturgesellschaft—Culture Society (Schwengell 1991). Added to this, there is also in the focus on fashion a more specific attention to gender within these various intersections. The work I describe is broadly women’s work and the young women who play a key role in the study hope to find the space to work independently by opting for self-employment. Although very few of them had children (none of the younger designers), there was a sense that this way of working could, at some point in the future, more easily accommodate family life. In fact, as we shall see, the work involved in being a one-woman business forces many women to postpone motherhood indefinitely. But why does the youth culture tradition analysed at length by Hall and others in the mid-1970s offer a useful path towards considering the working practices of fashion designers in Britain in the 1980s and 1990s? I have already sketched out an answer to this question in two fairly recent articles. In the first, I argue that whilst the youth culture work, best exemplifled in the work of Cohen (reprinted 1997), Hall and Jefferson (1976), and Hebdige (1978) offered a rich analysis of the history and meaning of these formations and their symbolic worlds, it overlooked the fact that these phenomena also generated opportunities for young people to make a living. The clothes and other items of youth cultural style had to be purchased somewhere and, I argue, many of those who provided for this market were in fact recruited from within. They found ways of making a living for themselves by servicing the youth subcultures in the form of record stalls and small shops, fashion outlets and again market stalls. Later, the whole dance club scene saw an enormous rise in what at the time I called ‘subcultural entrepreneurialism’ (McRobbie 1989, reprinted 1994). This self-generated, self-employment demonstrated the existence of a sprawling network of micro-economies initially inside the youth cultures, and then extending far beyond them.

It was here in the street markets, where new fashion ideas mingled with the second-hand dresses, that a good deal of the groundwork in creating British fashion design was carried out. I also argued at the time that the subcultural field in which new styles were so rapidly displayed and then replaced with new ones, meant that the origins of these fashions could never really be attributed to any one individual. Even though Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren are reco...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• BRITISH FASHION DESIGN
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• 1 FASHION DESIGN AND CULTURAL PRODUCTION
• 2 GREAT DEBATES IN ART AND DESIGN EDUCATION
• 3 THE FASHION GIRLS AND THE PAINTING BOYS
• 4 FASHION EDUCATION, TRADE AND INDUSTRY
• 5 WHAT KIND OF INDUSTRY? From getting started to going bust
• 6 A MIXED ECONOMY OF FASHION DESIGN
• 7 THE ART AND CRAFT OF FASHION DESIGN
• 8 MANUFACTURE, MONEY AND MARKETS IN FASHION DESIGN
• 9 A NEW KIND OF RAG TRADE?
• 10 FASHION AND THE IMAGE INDUSTRIES
• 11 LIVELIHOODS IN FASHION
• NOTES
• REFERENCES