From Production to Consumption: The Cultural Industry of Fashion

What do Marlies Dekkers' lingerie and contemporary flagship stores have in common? What links American Apparel's campaign to reform the U.S. immigration law and an ancient doll called Pandora? In a few words, the answer is: fashion. Fashion as an emblematic field to understand the contemporary social world. Fashion as a 'cultural industry' where the pole of production and that of consumption meet each other: on the one side, every process of ideation, designing and manufacturing carried out by professionals working in the fashion companies, and on the other, the complex and heterogeneous group of social actors who face the apparel proposals by buying (or not buying) clothes and - in so doing - putting them into their everyday lives as generators of meanings. The book aims to explore fashion as a meeting point between producers and consumers as well as processes and people whose work connects the two dimensions, making the materiality of clothes a doorway to join the immaterial horizons of fashion.