Fashion’s Influence on Garment Mass Production: Knowledge, Commodities and the Capture of Value Sally Weller A thesis submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Centre for Strategic Economic Studies Victoria University, Melbourne AUSTRALIA October 2003 ABSTRACT In affluent communities, it is difficult to think about clothing without considering issues of fashion. Yet, in analyses of the garment industries, fashion is rarely considered in detail, and is certainly not analysed as a structuring force over the configuration of garment production industries. Yet through fashion, garments as commodities are complexly embedded in social and cultural processes and in the specificities of place. Although the structures of the global garment production industries have been the subject of numerous studies from a variety of theoretical perspectives, none hitherto have addressed the influence of fashion on the structures and locations of garment production. This thesis begins with the idea that fashion is a complex and influential form of knowledge. It explores the effects of fashion ideas on the global garment system through a case study of the ideas and commodity flows that bring fashions and garments to the Australian market. It traces the interconnections between global knowledge flows and global commodity flows in a manner attuned to the relationships between knowledge, power, industrial organisation and the capture of surplus value from the production system. The analysis highlights how Australia’s position in garment production is framed by its geographical position on the periphery of the fashion world. Fashion knowledge is a complex form of knowledge with four interrelated expressions. First, fashion exists in the media, separate from the garment industries, where it contributes to the construction of ‘dream worlds’ of unreality. In this expression fashion influences consumers’ preferences for particular styles. Second, fashion exists in local communities, where fashion ideas spread through personal interactions in complex flows that are related to social status and personal aspirations. Third, fashion is expressed in garments, through their design qualities, where ideas are embedded into the cloth to create garments as socially meaningful objects. However, the meanings that garment convey are unstable and shift with the fashion mood. Fourth, fashion is expressed in firms, through brands, which capture fashion ideas as intellectual property and use them to generate profits. Fashion also influences firm strategies and the ways that firms relate to each other. The garment production system is concerned, fundamentally, with the coordination of these different expressions of fashion. i The first part of the thesis explores fashion’s impact on consumer desires and on the production system. In contrast to previous analyses, which have focused on the temporal movement of fashion changes, the discussion emphasises the stylistic aspects of fashion − the knowledges that create fashion styling and the mechanisms by which fashion knowledge diffuses in time and space. It shows that fashions in the globalised media are dominated by the styles of a relatively small number of designers who are located in key cities, who are linked closely to the beauty and media industries through licensing agreements, and whose style authority is protected by intellectual property rights. The uneven penetration of the elite fashions shown in the media generates uneven global landscapes of fashion. Nonetheless, the elite fashion system provides leadership to the mass production system by orchestrating the fashion trend direction and the timing of fashion seasons. This structure mitigates market uncertainty in the mass production sector. The mass production garment system follows the lead of elite styles, generating a plethora of interpretations, imitations, derivatives and copies depending on producer firms’ relation to intellectual property rights. Through these processes, fashion produces a global hierarchy stratified by style aesthetics, authenticity, production quality and price-income clustering. These segmentations are expressed by firms as fashion brands. The second part of the thesis examines the restructuring of the Australian garment industries in the 1990s to show how fashion altered the trajectories of firms as they adapted to Australia’s new market-oriented accumulation strategy. These chapters examine changing retail, production and import sourcing frameworks to show how the imperatives of fashion shaped the strategies of firms. Various examples specify how the globalisation of garment production is patterned by the interaction of the world of ideas and knowledges, in fashion, with the world of goods. Because fashion knowledge is unevenly distributed across places, both the values that people place on garments and the cost of producing garments vary from place to place. Firms in the fashion industries prosper by capturing the shifts in valuation that as garments travel in space and time. Specifically, firms capture a form of surplus value that is created as commodities shift between production-oriented value frameworks, based on the costs of labour and materials, and consumer-oriented value frameworks, based on the willingness to pay for fashion. The garment production system is led by the firms that understand and exploit value shifts. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many people have assisted in the preparation of this thesis. My supervisor Peter Sheehan provided an environment that allowed me the flexibility to develop my ideas and priorities. His comments at various stages of the research and writing process were as insightful as they were supportive. Michael Webber provided numerous inspirations to the development and theorisation of the work-in-progress. Our discussions pushed ideas to new stages and directions. Other people and institutions have given me help and support at different stages of the ongoing research. Victoria University’s Tradedata service provided me with the data sets for analysis in this thesis and in related work. I am grateful to the many people who provided me with information and resources at different parts of the project, especially to people in Australia, Hong Kong and Fiji who gave up their time to explain their roles in the garment industry. Listening to the discussions in the Economic Geography and International Political Economy list-servers connected me to wider intellectual communities that I could possibly access locally. The Australian Federal Government, through an Australian Post-Graduate Award, enabled me and my children to (barely) survive financially for duration of this project. I am indebted to other sources of funding: Victoria University assisted with annual stipends, and supplemented some of my travel costs. I am also grateful to the Commonwealth Department of Industry Science and Resources, the Woolmark Company, and the Victorian Government and the Australian Council of Trade Unions for providing intermittent consultancy work. Finally, I am indebted to my children, Terry and Patrick Hartnett, who have watched this project with amusement, and tolerated good-naturedly my apparently endless preoccupation with the computer screen. iii DECLARATION This thesis contains original research by me, unless otherwise stated in the text. This work has not been submitted previously, in whole or part, in respect of any other academic work. Content that draws on my own previously published work is indicated in the text. The dissertation is less than 100,000 words in length, exclusive of appendices, bibliography and footnotes. Sally Weller September 2003 .............................................................. Copyright in the text of this thesis rests with the author. Copies (by any process) either in full, or extracts, may only be made in accordance with instructions given by the author and lodged with the Victoria University Library. Details may be obtained from the Librarian. This page must form part of any such copies made. Further copies (by any process) made in accordance with such instructions may not be made without permission (in writing) of the Author. The ownership of the intellectual property rights which may be described in this thesis is vested in Victoria University, subject to any prior agreement to the contrary, and may not be made available for use by third parties without the prior written permission of the University, which will prescribe the terms and conditions of any such agreement. Further information on the conditions under which disclosures and exploitation may take place is available from the Director, Centre for Strategic Economic Studies, Victoria University. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract………………………………………………………..……………. (i) Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………. (iii) Declaration…………………………………………………………………... (iv) Table of Contents………………………………………….………………… (v) List of Tables………………………………………………………………... (xiii) List of Figures………………………………………….……………………. (xv) List of Abbreviations…………………………………. …………………..... (xvii) CHAPTER 1 Introduction and Overview…………………………………… 1 1.1 Globalisation, Clothing and Fashion………………………………….. 2 1.2 Aim and Themes………………………………………………………. 4 1.3 The Scope of Enquiry………………………………………………….. 5 1.4 Placing the Study in Economic Geography……………………………. 7 1.5 Methodological Approach……………………………………………... 9 1.6 Field Methods and Analysis 11 1.7 Structure of the Thesis…………………………………………………. 15 CHAPTER 2 Critique Of Geographies Of Garment Production……...……