The Fashion BusinessDuring the same decade, the media profile of the fashion business has been
raised to heady levels.
ID Magazine reported in 1999 that ‘the 90’s have been a decade of
heightened celebrity and fashion designers some of its brightest stars. The
grand narratives of fashion fame are as fascinating as any pop or celluloid’,^1
whilst the sociologist and anthropologist, Joanne Finkelstein notes that fashion
‘now functions as a form of global entertainment reported in the nightly
television news broadcast... the romances, wild escapades and indiscretions
of the fashion industry’s supermodels and the occasional political insensitivities
of its flamboyant designers all fuel the gossipy tabloids, and sometimes ignite
the mad indignation of the international press’.^2 The contemporary appetite
for fashion is insatiable, and yet it seems that the practical realities of the
fashion business are little known to very few other than those who work
within it, including it appears to the many authors of academic discourses
on the subject. It must also be noted that very few of those who practice
within the fashion industry are even dimly aware of the body of academic
research which has grown up around its theory and history. That a subject’s
theory should be thus divorced from its practice is unusual; the MaxMara
lectures aim to address this divide, for the benefit of practitioners and
academics alike and, with this book, we hope to bring it to the attention of a
wider audience. This, we believe, is the first sustained attempt at a concilia-
tion of such diverse views.
With the analysis of the fashion arena in the post-war period as its central
theme, the book is divided into three principal sections which have emerged
from the lectures as the sites of important debates: the theory and culture of
fashion, design and industry, image and marketing. The text begins with
Valerie Steele’s contextual overview of the history of fashion in the second
half of the twentieth century.
The first section which addresses theory and culture of fashion begins with
Christopher Breward’s analysis of recent methodological debates, now at
least partly resolved, that have engendered a multidisciplinary approach which
promises to be highly effective for unravelling complex contemporary issues.
Evidence of this can be found, for example, in Amy de la Haye’s study which
demonstrates the recent return of interest in the relationship between fashion
and craft. Through observation of contemporary practice and artefacts
considered in the light of design historical and ethnographical studies, de la
- Cole, B., ‘Receive the Look. Replicate the Look.. .’I.D. Magazine, October 1999, p.
- Finkelstein, J., ‘Chic – A Look that’s Hard to See’,Fashion Theory, vol 3, issue 3, Oxford:
Berg, 1999, pp. 363.