Re-presentation Policies of the Fashion Industry Discourse, Apparatus and Power

Introduction ix

Part 1. Re-presentations and Artifices 1

Introduction to Part 1 3

Chapter 1. Re-presentation as a Form of Artistic and Cultural Legitimization 5

1.1. The work of art and its reproducibility at the service of the fashion industry 7

1.1.1. Culturization of the purse, and portability of the work of art 9

1.1.2. The purse as an apparatus for commercial and artistic mediation 12

1.2. Book publishing at the service of the fashion brand’s cultural value 15

1.2.1. A book as beautiful as a trunk (Louis Vuitton) 16

1.2.2. Literary praise for luxury goods 19

1.3. The popularity of fashion accessories 20

1.3.1. The value of a luxury item through the club model 22

1.4. The exhibited advertising poster 24

1.4.1. Self-referential legitimations 25

1.4.2. Bricolage and illusion: advertising the advertising 27

1.5. The advertising poster as a testimonial discourse 29

1.5.1. The caption as a thematic and generic engagement 30

1.5.2. The presentation of the ready-to-wear collection as an event 32

Chapter 2. Investing Symbolically in the Museum, Transforming the Store: Re-presentation as an Iterative Event 35

2.1. From the boutique to heritage enhancement sites 36

2.1.1. The place where the brand’s heritage is developed: the advertiser’s dual entity 37

2.1.2. Patrimonialization and unadvertization: from forms to formats 40

2.2. The museum exhibition: a communicational pretext 42

2.2.1. Staging a symbolic distribution: from the discontinuous to the continuous 43

2.2.2. The image of a work of art: symbolic distribution and artification 46

2.3. Distribution of marketable goods and contemporary art: the full and the void 47

2.3.1. Cultural missions and department stores 48

2.3.2. From cultural mediations to market mediations (and vice versa) 49

2.3.3. In praise of the void and the worship of merchandise 53

Part 2. Re-presentations and Forms of Life: The Religious and the Political 57

Introduction to Part 2 59

Chapter 3. Re-presentation as a Cult Form 61

3.1. Biblical stories and media advertising: fashion and (divine) grace 64

3.1.1. Farmers, a storm and a boat: the biblical story of Noah’s Ark 66

3.1.2. The Gucci actant: from ready-to-wear to ready-to-save 69

3.2. Biblical stories and media advertising: fashion and adoration 71

3.2.1. Advertising idolatry 73

3.2.2. From product name to brand signature 74

3.2.3. Actualization and ostentation of Dior’s semiotic and religious capital 76

3.3. From places dedicated to Christian worship to places dedicated to fashion worship 78

3.3.1. From the Hospice des Incurables to the Balenciaga showroom 78

3.3.2. Profanation of the sacred, sacralisation of the lay public 82

3.3.3. Apparatus – Relic 84

3.3.4. Materiality, cult value and transparency 86

Chapter 4. Re-presentation as a Rewriting of Politics 89

4.1. The pretension of politics and its market value 93

4.1.1. Demonstration: presence, representation, event and spectacle 94

4.1.2. Re-presenting and misappropriating the demonstration 96

4.1.3. From stereotype to irony: political pretension 99

4.2. From text to (pre-)text: (political) mediations in the fashion industry 100

4.2.1. Rewriting the media image: reintroducing the formula (to better deconstruct it) 101

4.2.2. Imitation and counterfeiting of the event formula 104

4.3. Removal of the pre-text, and celebration of the pretext 108

4.3.1. Esthetization and commodification of the protest 108

4.3.2. Discrepancies between the medium and message 110

Part 3. The Power of the Fashion Industry’s Re-presentational Apparatus 115

Introduction to Part 3 117

Chapter 5. The Industrialization of Creativity 119

5.1. From the aristocratic model to the market model: the industrialization of luxury fashion 121

5.1.1. From the Court model to the designer model 121

5.1.2. From the market model to commercial luxury: pragmatic and symbolic democratization 123

5.2. Managerial creativity as a panoply 126

5.2.1. Forms and powers of managerial creativity in the fashion industry 127

5.2.2. Standardization: the industrialization of managerial creativity 130

5.2.3. Semiotic management of managerial creativity in the face of the market model 134

5.3. Physical space, media space and symbolic space 136

5.3.1. Material value and the immaterial value of fashion 138

5.3.2. Offshore manufacturing and production: a partial “made in France” approach 140

5.3.3. Modes and cycles: an environmental problem 143

5.3.4. From the back to the front region: the fashion industry, the stage and backstage 147

Chapter 6. Reinvesting, Diverting, Reformulating and Entertaining: The Leisure-form of the Fashion Industry 153

6.1. Reinvestments and reintroductions: from appropriation to subversion 155

6.1.1 Investing, reinvesting, re-presenting, appropriating: legitimacy and re-qualification 156

6.1.2. Reinvesting and subverting: the cultural hegemony of fashion 159

6.2. Diversions 162

6.2.1. Diverting politics 163

6.2.2. Diverting the diversion 165

6.3. Political power of the fashion industry’s re-presentation apparatus 167

6.3.1. The media industry in question: a phantasmagoria 168

6.3.2. The leisure-form 171

Conclusion 175

References 181

Index 193

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