Fashioning Globalisation New Zealand Design, Working Women and the Cultural Economy

by Molloy, Maureen; Larner, Wendy

• ISBN13: 9781444337020
• ISBN10: 1444337025
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2013-08-19
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

Drastic changes in the career aspirations of women in the developed world have resulted in a new, globalised market for off-the-peg designer clothes created by independent artisans. This book reports on a phenomenon that seems to exemplify the twin imperatives of globalisation and female emancipation. A major conceptual contribution to the literatures on globalisation, fashion and gender, analysing the ways in which women's entry into the labour force over the past thirty years in the developed world has underpinned new forms of aestheticised production and consumption as well as the growth of 'work-style' businesses A vital contribution to the burgeoning literature on culture and creative industries which often ignores the significant roles taken by women as entrepreneurs and designers rather than mere consumers Introduces fashion scholars and economic geographers to a paradigmatic example of the new designer fashion industries emerging in a range of countries not traditionally associated with fashion Takes a fresh perspective on an industry in which Third World garment workers have been the subject of exhaustive analysis but first world women have been largely ignored

Author Biography

Maureen Molloy is Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Auckland. Her work has focused on the relationships between academic ideas, policy contexts, and popular culture. Her most recent book is On Creating a Usable Culture: Margaret Mead and the Origins of American Cosmopolitanism (2008).

Wendy Larner is Professor of Human Geography and Sociology at the University of Bristol, UK. She is internationally recognized for her innovative scholarship on globalization, neoliberalism and governance, and has published in a wide range of international journals, and edited books across the social sciences.  She is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand and an Academician of the UK’s Academy of Social Sciences.

Table of Contents

List of Figures and Credits ix

Preface xi

Series Editors’ Preface xiv

Acknowledgements xv

1 What We Saw and Why We Started this Project 1

2 Global Aspirations: Theorising the New Zealand Designer Fashion Industry 19

3 Policy for a New Economy: ‘After Neoliberalism’ and the Designer Fashion Industry 43

with Richard Le Heron and Nick Lewis

4 Cultivating Urbanity: Fashion in a Not-so-global City 69

with Alison Goodrum

5 Gendering the ‘Virtuous Circle’: Production, Mediation and Consumption in the Cultural Economy 99

6 Creating Global Subjects: The Pedagogy of Fashionability 125

7 Lifestyle or Workstyle? Female Entrepreneurs in New Zealand Designer Fashion 153

8 Conclusion: An Unlikely Success Story? 179

Index 191