The Consumer Society Reader

However, this reconceptualization of fashion often required silence on the question of the point of origin of clothes or the identity and working conditions of those who make them, since this would bring into view the suffering of “other” women. Alternately, knitting and home-dressmaking could be rediscovered as part of a tradition of female leisure culture (like quilting in the U.S.) as long as these activities were done for creative pleasure rather than for pay.² In fact, these remained part of the household economies in Britain until the late 1950s, and in some cases into the early ’60s. If a mother couldn’t knit or sew (and most women could do at least one of these), she would have to pay a local dressmaker or knitter, since ready-to-wear clothing and quality knitwear remained beyond the reach of most family budgets.

In effect, the emphasis on the social meaning of fashion in contemporary culture and in everyday life has often occurred at the expense of thinking seriously about the work that goes into making fashion consumption possible. But the analysis of consumption should not require neglect of the conditions of production. A new starting point for a feminist politics of fashion has to bridge this divide and encompass six major stages in the fashion cycle: manufacture and production; the practices of design; education and training; retailing and distribution; the magazine and image industry; and the practices of consumption. In the pages that follow, I will provide a brief account of the main dynamics of these sectors, drawing on some of the material from my own recent research on this subject. I will argue that fashion can be redefined as a feminist issue in a way that avoids both the deep pessimism of the approach to labor and production and the celebratory zeal of the more recent attention to women’s pleasure in consumption. If the former envisages no light at the end of the tunnel, the latter runs the even greater risk of political complacency or indeed the flight from politics itself.

Phizacklea shows how, from the early 1980s, under the banner of Thatcher’s new “enterprise culture,” tiny units of production began to appear in London and the Midlands. Asian men, cashiered by the car factories and their subsidiaries, used their modest redundancy packages to establish themselves as small-scale garment entrepreneurs. This was possible because fashion remained a low-investment sector, requiring minimal space, a few sewing machines, an electronic cutter, and a press. Most important, these men had at their disposal a steady supply of cheap female labor within the immediate Asian community. Patriarchal family relations precluded work for these women outside the community, and financial need forced them to work long hours in tiny workshops or at home. Positioned on the wage floor of the labor market with all the forces of racial disadvantage weighing against them, these women continue to provide extraordinary cheap labor for the Cut, Make, and Trim chain of production.

In the U.K., then, it helps to see the “return of the sweatshop,” ordinarily discussed as a pure result of globalization and/or import competition, in the context of Thatcher’s own economic policies. Enterprise culture was as much a matter of avoiding unemployment and dependence on benefits as it was about setting up in business. And in the new business environment mandated by Thatcherism, there was no room for trade unionism, let alone any provision for sickness, holiday, or maternity pay. One of the results was the new flexible sweatshop—a potent example of the intensification of labor which has become almost the norm for those in employment in contemporary British society. For example, in my last home in North London, neighbors on either side participated in the Cut, Make, and Trim economy. On one side, an Asian grandmother worked as a child-minder during the day. All through the night we could hear the whirring of the sewing machine as she assembled fabric parts delivered by her sons and then returned to the wholesaler as finished goods the following morning. Likewise, on the other side, a Greek Cypriot woman received her garment pieces from a local Greek middleman, who would reappear the next day for the completed goods. Each of these women as a matter of course was expected to remain in or around the home rather than enter the world of “real work.”

It is women like these who are now producing for the U.K. fashion industry. They manufacture for well-known fashion designers even though the doings and identities of each agent remains quite unknown to the other. The designers farm out their orders to wholesalers or merchandisers who place advertisements in local newsagents or in the trade press and who then subcontract out the various stages of the work through a long, anonymous chain of ethnic producers, each of whom takes a cut. For all the designers I interviewed (most of whom were themselves surviving on a shoestring budget), this was the only way to ensure that orders would be done in time, to cost, and to the standard required by the retailers or stockists. Having suppliers working locally rather than offshore also meant that mistakes could be rectified within the required time frame.

The privatized, nonunionized work carried out by these women, sometimes for less than £1 an hour, has made it difficult for feminists to see any way forward. Reformers and activists have suggested that the most feasible remedy is a revival of trade unionism on a global basis, focused on the self-organization of Third World women workers in the clothing industry and supported by First World consumers in the form of the boycott. But any such alliance has to be more inclusive. It is rarely suggested, for example, that other workers in the fashion sector be involved in these struggles, least of all designers, who are assumed to stand at the opposite end of the political spectrum, on the side of management. Nor is there any real attempt to engage with the politics of consumption outside the boycott (although in the last few months in the U.K. the charity Oxfam has launched a clothes code campaign, asking retailers to display a label indicating that basic human rights have not been violated in the production of their garments). But even the most successful boycott can quickly be forgotten when publicity wanes and when hard-pressed consumers return to the cheapest stores in disregard of their suppliers.

There is also an assumption that the women who make these clothes exist only as producers and never as consumers themselves. Some element of style and taste always enters into the small pleasures which the poorest garment workers also derive from items of consumption (TV sets, clothes, cosmetics, for example). If these are ignored, the effect is to “culturally deprive” these women and thus emphasize only their status as victims of capitalism, reducing every aspect of their lives to a matter of, as the title of Rowbotham and Mitter’s book indicates, Dignity and Daily Bread. However, as Stuart Hall has argued, “everybody, including people in very poor societies whom we in the West frequently speak about as though they inhabit a world outside culture, knows that today’s ‘goods’ double up as social signs and produce meanings as well as energy.”⁴

I would like to suggest a less gloomy prognosis. In Britain at the present moment, it is not impossible to envisage higher degrees of self-organization and cooperation among low-paid clothing workers. This has already begun to happen with the appearance of homeworker associations. A New Labour government (committed also to introducing a minimum wage) could encourage local authorities to support such developments with fairly modest grants and funding. Skill levels and qualifications could also be improved by encouraging attendance at local community-based colleges, thus increasing the earning potential of these women. In the longer term, greater business confidence on the part of these women workers could lead to some elimination of the various middlemen who currently skim off most of the profits. This would bring ethnic women workers closer to the designers, who would also benefit from being able to see their work right through to the finished garments. It would give the designers better insight into a production process about which they remain surprisingly ignorant.

BRITISH FASHION DESIGNERS

The results of my recent study of art school–trained designers shows most of them setting up in business from within a culture of unemployment. ⁵ Every young designer I interviewed had been enrolled at some point in what was called the Enterprise Allowance Scheme (EAS). To be eligible, applicants technically had to be unemployed for at least three months. With £1,000 of capital (usually borrowed from relatives), they could receive payments of £40 or £50 a week, which could be retained alongside any profits made. The scheme was ended a couple of years ago, but during its existence provided the underpinning of the fashion design boom of the mid-1980s to early ’90s. Despite all the publicity garnered by figures like Darlajane Gilroy, Pascal Smets, Pam Hogg, Sonnentag and Mulligan, Workers for Freedom, Pierce Fonda, and two sisters working under the English Eccentrics label, there have been many points in their career when they openly admit that they barely scraped a living. The cost of producing orders for well-known department stores in Britain and the U.S. while awaiting payment for sales from retailers has put too much stress on many of the small design companies. Cash-flow crises in what is a massively undercapitalized sector have made bankruptcies a very normal occurrence. For example, when I visited Sonnentag and Mulligan in 1993, I had high hopes they would survive. Their clothes were featured all across the fashion press, and the big clothing department stores on both sides of the Atlantic were placing regular orders. Even at this stage, however, they were living and working from the same studio space, employed only one machinist, were both on the EAS, and relied on a student intern to handle publicity. Despite their levelheaded approach and market savvy, they had to call in the receivers earlier this year.

What emerges as a career in fashion design is a mixed economy with designers surviving only if they free-lance for bigger, more commercial companies, while reserving time for their “own work” on a one/two-day a week basis. Sometimes they free-lance for up to three different companies, all the while harboring the dream of getting their own label off the ground. As one young woman put it:

I was doing well and Madonna bought onxit, stitch for stitch, and then mass produce it. Bloomingdales didn’t reorder, and with all the overhead, I went under. I was twenty-six, with over £20,000 of debts, so I gave up and went back on the dole.

In this context, it is not surprising that young designers are either silent or else embarrassed by discussions about how much they are able to pay their own in-house sample machinists, pattern cutters, etc.—never mind the women further down the chain who produce the orders. The designers I interviewed were, to some extent, willing victims of self-exploitation for the reason that they considered themselves artists first and entrepreneurs second. Even the most successful labels, like Ally Capellino, Helen Storey (which has since ceased trading), and Pam Hogg (likewise), on my estimate were working with an annual turnover in the range of £1 million to £2 million (figures that are borne out by the British Fashion Council survey of 150 companies in 1990). All fashion designers work a punitive round-the-clock schedule made more palatable by the knowledge that this is what creative people do.

While this might make it difficult to see designers lending support to machinists seeking union recognition and better working hours, it is not inconceivable that those who sketch might find they have quite a lot in common with those who sew. To do so, they would need to find a way of breaking down some of the social barriers that currently make it unlikely their paths ever cross. Nor should we assume that all fashion designers are the direct products of Thatcher’s enterprise culture. Many have simply found ways of making enterprise fit with their artistic identities as creative designers. With so many of Britain’s most successful designers coming from poor, working-class, or immigrant backgrounds, and with mothers who have worked in the rag trade, they are likely to be more than sympathetic to the idea of a better organized and better paid work force. My research certainly shows them to be angry and frustrated by Tory governments’ refusal to take fashion design seriously as a matter for industrial policy. What is urgently needed is some strategic thinking about how these talented and highly trained young designers could, with small teams of well-paid and well-trained production workers, create an honest business culture that could survive in the face of global competition. This might well mean working periodically in partnership with the big fashion retailers who occupy such a powerful position in British fashion. But survival should not entail absorption by the big companies, a step that inevitably leads to the demise (or fatal compromise) of independent creative design.

EDUCATION AND TRAINING

Education and training should also play a role in this new survival strategy. British fashion education rightly has an international reputation for energetically encouraging young talent. It has expertise and knowledge in its academic staff, many of whom are prestigious figures on the international scene. Fashion academics also lobby hard on various official bodies. However, there are some points at which fashion education could play a more effective role in improving the performance of the design industry. At present, fashion design education is too committed to defending the fine art status of fashion to be interested in the messy business of manufacture and production. As a “feminine” field in the high-culture world of the art schools, and traditionally worried about being seen as merely teaching “dressmaking,” educators in fashion have looked upwards to the fine arts for legitimacy and approval. The persona of the fashion designer is consequently modeled on that of the painter, sculptor, or auteur (noncommercial) filmmaker. The aura of creative genius provides a cultural framework for talking about, exhibiting, or “showing” the work.

While this attitude makes some sense both as a utopian strategy for personal reward in work and for psychological survival in a deindus-trialized economy, it means that art students spurn and disavow the whole business of actually making clothes. Often it is a mark of professional pride not to know how to put in a zip. Fashion students never visit a factory throughout the course of their training. Perhaps it is convenient for them not to know about how orders are put into production and who makes them up, since this would raise unpleasant questions about pay and working conditions. As one fashion academic said to me, “It would take all the romance out of it.” But ignorance of production can only be detrimental to this creative economy if the whole point of fashion design is to realize the original (or prototype) on a scale that reaches beyond the runway. Fashion educators would thus be doing their students a favor by overcoming the bias toward fine art and introducing core courses on fashion as a labor process. Apart from anything else, this would also make designers less vulnerable to exploitation by unscrupulous suppliers who ruthlessly overcharge on production costs while brutally underpaying their subcontracted labor force.

BRITISH FASHION RETAILING

There is no space here to enter into a full discussion of retailing save to explain that, despite the scale of this sector—estimated at £234 million in 1994, out of £7 billion for all clothing sales⁶—trade union representation has barely survived the Thatcher years. The Union of Shop Distributors and Allied Workers (USDAW) now reports an uphill struggle to hold on to a dwindling membership even in food retailing. There is no significant membership in fashion and clothing. What this means is that the early 1980s boom in retail culture (including new design-oriented chains like Next, the Gap, Jigsaw, Whistles, Hobbs, and in men’s wear, Woodhouse and Paul Smith), complementing the ideologically driven consumer confidence championed by the Thatcher government, was entirely based on the employment of a nonunion work force. This is the reality that labor campaigners and policy makers now have to accept. One strategy is to work with more progressive retailers like Paul Smith to ensure better careers in fashion retail for the thousands of young people now employed in this sector, and at the same time to expose the atrocious working conditions that prevail in many other outlets in the hope that political attention and bad publicity might force employers to take action.

For example, in my conversations with a number of young women who had worked in these outlets, it became clear that in many down-market fashion shops in North and East London, owners paid their managers and assistants cash to avoid tax and insurance and on the “understanding” that staff could also claim unemployment benefits. Thus we see petty capital colluding to defraud the welfare state. By paying minimum wages of £3.50 an hour to single mothers as well as unqualified school-leavers, such employers oblige them to “fiddle” the social security. This raises a further political hot potato which no Labour or Tory politician can bear to confront, which is the pervasiveness of the hidden economy, itself the result of Britain’s emergence as a low-pay and part-time workers economy. It seems quite absurd for New Labour to invest political energy in the aim of creating a “stakeholder society” based on the assumption that firms and companies will continue to employ hundreds of thousands of full-time workers. The reality could not be further from this vision. As even the biggest companies like British Telecom and the banks announce redundancies on a monthly basis, economic forecasts suggest that in the next ten years, by far the majority of British companies will be comprised of flexible units employing less than twelve people! Flexible here also means free-lance. In some respects, this puts the design industry at the forefront of the U.K. economy. As an ideal type in the growing sector of cultural industries, there is more and more reason to take it seriously.

Of course, the scant prospect of a resurgence of trade unionism among shop workers does not mean that there are no possibilities for labor reform. I suspect this is more likely to happen if the work force who adorn the floor at Donna Karan can be brought into better contact with some newly constituted fashion industry forum or lobby group that would better represent the interests of shopfloor workers than other forms of labor organization. After all, they tend to see themselves as fashion people first and shop workers second. But what kind of job exactly is it to work for Paul Smith or for Whistles? Paul Smith is proud of his record of training up shop assistants to managerial positions in his now vast and highly successful company. But with a complete absence of research on this subject, it is impossible to say how the average shop assistant working in the local branch of Next or, for that matter, behind the counter at Calvin Klein, navigates a career in this field. What is clear is that part-time contracts are increasingly the norm and this in itself has consequences for sickness and maternity pay, pensions, and even holidays. Who knows what will happen when this currently youthful labor force needs maternity leave or days off to look after sick children. It may well be that workers in this sector will have recourse to the law to defend their rights rather than to the now largely defunct (and patriarchal) British trade union organizations.

THE FASHION MAGAZINES

Fashion magazines are astoundingly timid when it comes to any form of social criticism. As Roland Barthes pointed out many years ago, everything in their pages has to be therapeutic and reassuring so that nothing unpleasant intrudes on the wearing of fashionable clothes.⁷ Nowadays, British fashion editors and their journalists play this card by professing “loyalty” to the U.K. fashion industry. They would not write about low pay and sweatshop conditions at home or abroad because their duty is to support the industry, an already fragile edifice as we have seen. But this could easily change with a few more adventurous editors or a little pressure from young journalists to run intelligent writing on the fashion industry, which would actually do justice to their increasingly well-educated and discerning female readership. In fact, such a strategy could push the magazines into a position of greater power and prominence. If they took the lead in cleaning up the fashion industry, they might be seen by policy makers and politicians as responsible players in this important field.

There is an additional incentive here. The women’s magazine sector remains a low-status field of journalism. It is considered the trivial end of the commercial mass media and it is rare for a journalist (or indeed an editor) on a women’s magazine to make the quantum leap into the national (even tabloid) press. Nor do the women who work on these magazines get many opportunities to move laterally into television except perhaps as a fashion commentator in a daytime magazine slot. The result is that there are limited jobs, and the great majority of these are free-lance. The turnover of writers is very high, since many become disillusioned and give up. These are sufficient reasons for the magazine industry to reconsider its role, function, and format. The current taste in fashion-oriented magazines like Marie-Claire, Looks, and Company for downmarket tabloid-style sleaze and sensationalism stands in contrast to their timidity when it comes to considering the option of speaking more intelligently to well-informed readers. The fear, of course, is that critical reportage on the fashion industry will lose advertising revenue (and top editorial jobs depend on keeping advertisers happy). But in an age when corporations are desperate to put an ethical gloss on their activities, these magazines should see the commercial incentive involved in supporting campaigns that would extend human rights to all garment workers. This dimension could also be understood as adding diversity to the rather formulaic menu of feminine commercial culture found in magazines rather than, as editors and journalists currently fear, putting themselves out of a job.

THE PRACTICES OF CONSUMPTION

The logic of conventional left and feminist thinking on issues of consumption is as follows. Having recognized how consumerism is the crucial means by which capitalism pulls us all into its unrelenting grip, we have to learn how to detach ourselves from its allure, break the spell of seduction, and become cautious, ethical, even parsimonious consumers. By the mid-1980s, this lofty, moralistic stance was coming under fire from feminists and those on what might be described as the cultural left. Suddenly, it was necessary to better understand our own and other people’s participation in consumption and then to recognize the importance people attach to acts of consumption as markers or expressions of their own identity.

Now, in the mid-1990s, this endorsement of consumption (notably fashion consumption) by many feminists has gone too far. Celia Lury, Mica Nava, and others have suggested that consumption affords women a certain degree of power and authority to make choices.⁸ But it is important to differentiate the power of boycott, for example, from the power or authority of the female consumer to treat the girl behind the counter as though she were a servant. The weakness of the new feminist consumer studies is that they tend to avoid questions about class relations in consumption. The general tendency is to narrowly focus on the activities of those who can afford to consume while neglecting to address the limits of consumption of those largely excluded from this realm. Lury and Nava each fail to recognize that for the vast majority of women, consumption, including fashion consumption, is an intensely frustrating economic activity.

The justification for this focus on what I would argue are affluent consumers is twofold. First, to counter the puritanism of the (now old) new left and feminist approaches, and second, to appear to be up-to-date in recognizing that with the decline in heavy industry, changes in class structure have produced a more aspiring, consumer-oriented working-class and lower-middle-class strata. Indeed, Lury seems to be suggesting that because production is now more or less out of sight, tucked away in the free trade zones, it is easier for consumers to participate unconstrained by a bad conscience or by the memory or direct experience of being a producer, since there is now a “relative independence of practices of consumption from those of production.”⁹

It has to be acknowledged that most people, especially fashion-conscious youth, enjoy shopping for clothes and find it hard to reconcile their own pleasure in finding a bargain at Whistles or Agnes B with the political reality of the low wages and long hours involved in making these clothes. There is considerable psychological pressure to block out such thoughts; indeed, the pleasure of shopping depends on it. If this mindset is to change, then it cannot be left up to consumers alone. Garment companies would not be running scared of bad publicity if they did not take seriously the threat of consumer boycotts mobilized by exposes of superexploitation. But the rag trade has been associated with poverty wages for over a century, and this fact alone does not persuade people to make their clothing purchases with labor conditions in mind.

One of the problems of trying to develop a politics of consumption in relation to fashion is that so many people are involved at so many different locations that it is difficult to coordinate or think through such an analysis in an organized or manageable way. The only solution is to break down or disaggregate the practices of consumption to a more localized level, to contextualize particular forms of consumption in particular communities, cities, regions, or even neighborhoods. This then allows us at least to explore the social relations connecting producers with consumers. We can see signs of a closer dialogue between fashion producers and consumers where they each inhabit a shared cultural milieu, as they do for example in the club culture of Britain in the 1990s.

Currently, the latter is one of the few sectors of the small-scale design industry that is doing well. It comprises British designer/producers who share an involvement in the dance scene with their fellow dancers and with the musicians, DJs, producers, and promoters who in turn often put up the capital from club profits to set the designers up in business (usually with a store). The clothes are thus an integral part of the club circuit and can be bought from these new outlets or else from unit-type outlets across the country, including Hyper-Hyper, Covent Garden, and Camden Market in London, and the Lace Market in Nottingham. Club designer labels like Sign of the Times, Sub Couture, and Wit and Wisdom all produce relatively cheap clothes for those young people for whom dancing has become a primary leisure activity. Sharing the same cultural values as the consumers gives the designer/producers (most of whom, with a couple of friends, design, sew, and sell themselves) a different kind of relationship with their market. Their services are more personal, and they function not unlike the corner store in the traditional working-class neighborhood, or indeed like the local dressmakers mentioned earlier. They survive by their ability to shape and anticipate what people want to be wearing inside and outside the clubs. Inevitably the big retail outlets pick up on these “innovators” and put copies of their styles into mass circulation, but that does not negate the cultural and economic significance of the original, nor can it replicate the active role of the original consumers who contribute directly to the vitality of the subculture. Where would punk have been if the customers hadn’t come flooding into Westwood and Maclaren’s Sex (then Seditionaries) shop on the Kings Road? This retail transaction was a crucial stage in the production of punk culture, just as the boutiques of Carnaby Street had been a crucible for pop in the 1960s.

What I have outlined above is an approach that insists on seeing fashion production and consumption in the economic context of leisure spaces. Club culture, in particular, has now become an important source of livelihood in what is arguably Britain’s most profitable cultural sector. There is no doubt that some of the attraction of the club scene lies in its capacity to provide an economic as well as symbolic model for a more engaged sense of community than that offered by mainstream capitalist consumerism. But the dispersed, small-scale, survivalist economics of this model must be set alongside the dynamics of the global labor market and the toil it has exacted on the domestic work force. The situation of the garment industry in the U.K. raises the much larger question of the extension and penetration of low-wage economies in First World countries. In this respect, there is a smaller gap between the highly qualified designers and the low-skill producers than is commonly imagined. Neither group is well paid, and they survive on a casualized, free-lance, or semi-self-employed basis. Most are female, live in cities, find themselves disadvantaged in regard to health and welfare benefits, mortgage applications, maternity benefits, and even holiday pay. Although they are not well represented by the trade union, nor by any lobby or pressure group or trade organization, there is no good reason why designers and producers should not be allies in pursuit of common self-interest.

All it would take is a shared sense of frustration and the desire to utilize existing talents, skills, and expertise. It would be easy to establish some kind of fashion-forum pressure group with teeth (since such affinity groups remain one of the few real sources of political energy in Britain today). Government could then play its role. The Labour party would score points by supporting (even initiating) such a move, especially since most voters these days have a daughter, son, or relative who has some involvement in the vast culture industries. This would entail a commitment by Labour to find ways of helping fashion workers translate their skills and commitment as well as creative talent into a sustainable fashion design industry which can match international renown with living wages.

GARMENT MANUFACTURE AND PRODUCTION

BRITISH FASHION DESIGNERS

EDUCATION AND TRAINING

BRITISH FASHION RETAILING

THE FASHION MAGAZINES

THE PRACTICES OF CONSUMPTION

ENDNOTES