This item is held in Loughborough University’s Institutional Repository (https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/) and was harvested from the British Library’s EThOS service (http://www.ethos.bl.uk/). It is made available under the following Creative Commons Licence conditions. For the full text of this licence, please go to: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ ART WORLD, RAG TRADE OR IMAGE INDUSTRY? A CULTURAL SOCIOLOGY OF BRITISH FASHION DESIGN. BY ANGELA MCROBBIE. Thesis submitted to Loughborough University in partial fulfilment of Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. April 1998. ;'r ACKNOWLEDGMENTS. I would like to thank my supervisor Graham Murdock for his excellent advice and support and also for his intellectual guidance. I would also like to thank the library staff at Central StMartins College of Art and Design for all their help. Finally I would like to thank the many people who agreed to be interviewed for this study. To honour confidentiality on questions of policy and funding I have named all headsof department who were interviewed alphabetically, and likewise on the basis of issues of income and livelihoods being discussedI have given all fashion designers pseudonyms.However I haveretained the propernames of journalistsand other professionals according to the agreementat the time of interview. ABSTRACT. This thesis argues that the distinctivenessof contemporary British fashion design can be attributed to the history of education in fashion design in the art schools, while the recent prominence and visibility is the result of the expansion of the fashion media. Fashion design had to struggle to achieve disciplinary status in the art schools. Tarnished by its associationswith the gendered and low status practice of the dressmakingtradition, and then in the post war years, with the growth of massculture and popular culture, fashion educators have emphasisedthe conceptual basis of fashion design. Young fashion designersgraduating from art school and entering the world of work develop an occupational identity closer to that of fine artists. This is a not unrealistic strategy given the limited nature of employment opportunities in the commercial fashion sector. But as small scale cultural entrepreneursrelying on a self- employed and freelance existence,the designersare thwarted in their ability to maintain a steady income by their lack of knowledge of production, sewing and the dressmaking tradition. The current network of urban `micro-economies' of fashion design are also the outcome of the enterprise culture of the 1980s. Trained to think of themselves primarily as creative individuals the designersare ill-equipped to develop a strategy of collaboration and associationthrough which their activities might become more sustainable.While the fashion media has also played a key role in promoting fashion design since the early 1980s,they are overwhelmingly concernedwith circulation figures. They produce fashion images which act as luxurious environmentsfor attracting advertising revenue. Consequentlythey carry little or no coverage on issues relating to employment or livelihoods in fashion. But their workforce is also creative, casualisedand freelance.In each case,these young workers are the product of the shift in the UK to an emergentform of cultural capitalism comprising of low pay and the intensification of labour in exchangefor the reward of personal creativity. This current sociological investigation aims to open the debate on the potential for the future socialisation of creative labour. TABLE OF CONTENTS. CHAPTER ONE FASHION DESIGN AND CULTURAL PRODUCTION 1-29. : ..... CHAPTER TWO GREAT DEBATES IN ART AND DESIGN 30-58. : ....................... CHAPTER THREE : THE FASHION GIRLS AND THE PAINTING BOYS 59-93. ... CHAPTER FOUR : FASHION EDUCATION, TRADE AND INDUSTRY..... 94-117. CHAPTER FIVE : WHAT KIND OF INDUSTRY? FROM GETTING STARTED TO GOING BUST 118-153. ......................................................................................... CHAPTER SIX MD(ED ECONOMY OF FASHION DESIGN 15 176. :A ................ CHAPTER SEVEN : THE ART AND CRAFT OF FASHION DESIGN....... 177-200. CHAPTER EIGHT : MANUFACTURE, MONEY AND MARKETS IN FASHION DESIGN 201- 236. ....................................................................................................... CHAPTER NINE NEW KIND OF RAG TRADE? 237-253. :A ................................. CHAPTER TEN : FASHION AND THE IMAGE INDUSTRIES 259- 2-91. ................. CHAPTER ELEVEN : THE WORK OF FASHION DESIGN: LIVELIHOODS IN FASHION 299 Z4. .................................................................................................... -3. BIBLIOGRAPHY 3 5,335. .......................................................................................... CHAPTER ONE 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 in the political magazine Marxism Today, were published in a volume titled 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 UK, 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 careersof 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 on 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 could be seenthroughout the 1980s in magazines like The Face and the left wing New Socialist. Figures like Brody and fashion designers like, say, 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 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 fulfil the Tory dreams of re-building British society on 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 supportof 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 suggestedinstead 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 working longer hours than evena 19th century employer could expect of his workforce. More fool them! These would be the middle-class or professional equivalent to the newly casualised and flexible workers described by Anna Poliert as being encouraged repeatedly during this period to `live with insecurity and learn to love it' (Poliert 1988: 72). Neither of these characterisations seemed to me convincing or adequateas accounts of the cultural intermediaries who were entering, or rather, creating their own labour market throughout this decade. 2 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 in sociology or in cultural studies of this kind of work 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 conclusionsfrom the mainstreamleft. In practicethey showedfew signsof 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 '60s or '70s counterparts who were more thoroughly `subjectivised' by the 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,