McRobbie, A. (2002). Fashion Culture: Creative Work, Female Individualization. Feminist Review, 71(1), 52-62.
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Opening
Self-organisation of the 1980s London model that McRobbie noted - an alternative organisation of creative labour derived from subcultures against the state or corporate planning - must not be reduced to romanticisation or petit-bourgeois entrepreneurship. This experimental, 'quasi-entrepreneurial' practice often demonstrates how exploitation morphs into benevolence, with perpetrators re-emerging as saviours. It is widely recognised that this narrative inversion is worsening today on social media. Creativity, which serves as the self-rationale for desperate young talents, is actually a mechanism to justify self-exploitation, enabling the continuation of a knowledge economy that glorifies talent.
While various circumstances and dynamics are webbed, what role did 'Fashion Studies' play? In its desperate bid to 'elevate' itself to the prestigious realm of fine art, fashion design has relentlessly relied on a posture of 'distinction,' deliberately distancing itself from the garment-making labour. Unfortunately, the scholarly attempts to decode fashion merely as signs, discourse, language, communication, or imagery - regardless of the author's original intentions - have culminated in little more than an extension of this desire to be validated as visual art. To make matters worse, the labour market analysis of garment manufacturing ended in an intellectual schism between Marxist social scientists and feminist researchers focused on gender and consumer culture. Fashion Studies constructed its own internal hierarchy. This is a methodological dereliction of duty, particularly regarding the exploitation of the younger generation, and specifically women. The framework circulated under Adorno's name was incorrect. Fashion did not cause art to degenerate into snoberry as a henchman of capitalism; instead, it served as a vital instrument in preserving and perpetuating neoliberal governmentality itself.
Excerpts
- a sector that appears to be thriving and is seen as a highly attractive career location for young women in reality is undergoing rapid shifts that have deleterious consequences for this youthful and enthusiastic workforce.1
- Certainly, feminist scholars continue to explore fashion culture, but more often from the perspective of the image, of pleasure, of the body and consumption.2
- processes of female individualization and a harshly competitive ‘must try harder and harder’ ethos (Bauman, 2000) proceed without recourse to feminist political understanding.3
- the message from the incoming New Labour Government from 1997 onwards has been to celebrate the so-called ‘talent led economy’… This has meant withdrawing subsidies including benefits and replacing these with ‘business support.4
- These young women (outnumbering men at the rate of approximately 10 to 1) were in effect guinea pigs for the new cultural economy.5
- small livelihoods in fashion design and production need not be disregarded as miniscule and insignificant in relation to the global economy.6
- they can by-pass the young independent designers altogether by employing their own scouts or ‘coolhunters’… They can also make good use of talented fashion students working unpaid as interns.7
reader’s Notes
- Did McRobbie view the exploitation of young women as a direct consequence of a ‘disconnect’ in knowledge production? As long as different disciplines and sectors fail to converse, the fashion industry as a whole remains opaque. This observation serves as much as a methodological manifesto as it does a structural critique. ↩︎
- Following the ‘consumer turn’ in 1990s cultural studies, the critical issues of fashion production and labour were largely relegated to traditional Marxists rather than feminists. Given McRobbie’s own background as a researcher of subculture and consumption, this passage is self-critical. Because cultural studies lost sight of the physical labour that produces such aesthetic pleasure, the ambition of this text is to synthesise women as both consumers and producers within a single analytical frame. ↩︎
- This became the prototype of the post-feminist critique that McRobbie would later refine. The dismissal of feminism here is not merely an ideological retreat; it is a structural prerequisite for the governance of labour. The very representation of the ’emancipated’ woman functions systematically to block any avenues for politicising collective grievances. ↩︎
- Here we witness a shift in governmentality in the Foucauldian sense. The logic dictates that if you have talent, the free market will inevitably validate it; if you fail, you lacked the talent to begin with. ↩︎
- Young female designers were the test subjects for a newly emerging cultural economy. The reason they slipped under the radar of both feminist researchers and policymakers is ironic: they occupied an “apparently privileged” category that fell completely outside the conventional focus of feminist labour studies (i.e., low-wage, manufacturing, and domestic work). Yet, as McRobbie emphasises, their class composition was entirely heterogeneous, encompassing impoverished Turkish and Asian backgrounds, as well as mothers employed at the very bottom of the garment trade. This fluidity—where educational capital violently collides with class vulnerability—is the exact harbinger of the ‘precarity’ that defines the modern “risk society.” These women navigated the treacherous waters of gig work and the creator economy two full decades before contemporary sociological analyses finally caught up to them. ↩︎
- Market stalls, back alleys, and low-rent districts provided the essential material conditions that made artistic experimentation possible. When real estate prices surged, it wasn’t just physical square footage that vanished, but the very possibility for structural experimentation itself. This insight—that the problem of creativity is inextricably linked to urban spatial politics and rent—subsequently expanded into broader comparative studies of London, Berlin, and Milan (McRobbie, Strutt and Bandinelli, 2022). ↩︎
- The ‘young designer extinction’ is executed through a dual technology of exclusion and absorption. Massive corporations entirely bypass independent designers by deploying ‘coolhunters’ to harvest styles directly from the streets and clubs, cherry-picking at will from a vast, desperate pool of art school graduates, exploiting the raw talent of unpaid interns, and hiring youth as pseudo-anthropologists of style. It is a predatory structure where the source of creativity (youth culture) and the creative worker (the designer) are violently severed from each other and exploited on separate fronts. Meanwhile, the press—acting as vital cultural intermediaries—is effortlessly co-opted by corporate hospitality and exclusive parties. ↩︎
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