Fashion's World Cities

by Christopher Breward (Editor), David Gilbert (Editor)

New York, Paris, London, Milan, Tokyo. This familiar list of cities conjures up the image of high fashion. This book examines the powerful relationship between metropolitan modernity and fashion culture. The authors look at the significance of certain key sites in fashion's world order and at transformations in the connections between key cities. The status of fashion capital has now become a goal for urban boosters and planners, part of the wider promotion of the "cultural economy" of major cities. In a rapidly changing global fashion system new centres like Shanghai are making claims to join the ranks of Fashion's World Cities. In chapters ranging from Los Angeles to Moscow and Dakar to Mumbai, Fashion's World Cities explores the relationship between major metropolises and the production, consumption and mythologizing of fashion.

Genres: Fashion

304 pages, Paperback

First published December 12, 2006

About the author

Christopher Breward is Director of Collection and Research at the National Galleries of Scotland, UK and Professorial Fellow at Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh, UK.

Reviews

[Malcolm · Rating 3 out of 5]

For something seemingly so simple, fashion is a remarkably complex and challenging thing to try to make sense of. On the one hand it is a straightforward issue of clothes, but it also about style, impermanence (if it didn’t change, it wouldn’t be fashion), it is an industry involving at times huge amounts of money while our fashions have immeasurable semiotic power. Fashions also mark and embody place – we recognise the tam-o-shanter as being of Scotland, the cheong sam as being of China (although most of us do not recognise the complex negotiations of ‘east’ and ‘west’ that it involves), and the casual prêt-à-porteur chic of Milan – while the ‘fashion industry’ plays a key role in so many cities’ cultural industry driven economic regeneration plans.

This intriguing but uneven collection is driven, in part, by an effort to make sense of the archaeology of this fashion industry-urban dynamic by exploring the place, form and idea of the Fashion City. There are some ways in which this idea needs no real introduction – we almost all know that Paris and with in La Parisienne is inherently ‘fashionable’ as anyone can see in a visit to the parts of the 5th & 6th that are not overwhelmed by tourists, or as a window-shopping wander through parts of the 16th reveal (the Champs Elysées having been over-run by tourist tat and chain stores) while also acting as the epitome, apotheosis even, of all that is fashionably stylish. Despite this sense that so many of us have of knowing and recognising the Fashion City, several of the essays and case studies in this collection do well to unsettle our takens-for-granted – but it could have done so much more.

Aside from the two introductory chapters – Gilbert’s geographically framed discussion of the shifting meaning of the idea and its place in contemporary and global politics, economics and a competition for status and Elizabeth Wilson’s brief culturally configured overview of fashion, urbanity and the urbane – the book has three sections dealing with city styles and their representation(s), the changing fashion-urban order, and the place of the city in the shifting transnational networks of fashion as style, cultural practice and economics. The essays that make up these sections reveal the richness of styles, approaches and theories in fashion writing so we see geographers, cultural studies practitioners, historians, curators, film studies scholars and anthropologists among others rummaging around in the network of ideas and themes that make the fashion and urban studies field so rich.

Despite this methodological and disciplinary difference, however, the geographical spread is limited with eight of the 12 chapters (other than the two introductions) centred on western Europe and the north Atlantic – and of the other four one deals with Moscow and one with California, leaving only Tokyo and Dakar. To be fair, two of the eight explore the ‘orientalising’ and ‘ethnicising’ of London fashion, with one paying considerable attention to cultural and economic flows between Britain and India, but the overall sense is of a limited view of ‘world’ in fashion’s cities. This is not to say that many of the essays are not innovative and challenging – Bronwen Edwards’ exploration of the post-WW2 plans to redevelop London’s West End ses them take on a new and unsettling sense when she reads them through a frame of consumption, while Agnès Rocamora’s essay exploring the distinctive place of Paris as global and French but not in fashion terms part of the rest of France is rich in its semiotic subtlety.

Four essays in particular stood out for me: Hudita Nura Mustafa’s incisive reading of the rich and complex world of Dakar not as a new place of couture but as a place where colonial and indigenous meet, while also acting as a west African cultural nexus linking a diverse interior to a richly layered set of worlds that are French and Atlantic and more recently west and east Asian is a marvel. Olga Vainstein shows us a Moscow displaying both continuity and rupture through the Soviet era while the oligarch’s Moscow is isolated from the vast majority of the city’s citizens. I enjoyed Simona Segre Reinachs’ analysis of Milan as building cultural power and status while also marrying couture, prêt-à-poteur and the newly and increasingly ubiquitous fast fashion. It is against this vision of fast fashion that Leslie Rabine and Susan Kaiser’s discussion of blue jeans in California takes shape – they challenge in a way none of the other author’s really do the global political economy of fashion and what it means to be ethical in the fashion industries as the dream machines of semiotic and symbolic California meet the sewing machines of clothing production.

In the six years since the book was published the power and influence of fashion’s new world cities has grown – Mumbai, Shanghai, Dakar and Accra have become more important and challenged the power and hegemony of the old – New York, London, Paris, Milan and Tokyo, a quintet that still easily rolls off the tongue. That only one of these new cities (Dakar) merits significant attention in this collection (although Gilbert pays close attention to Shanghai in his introduction) is not a sign of the newness of the new, but the gaps in this collection. What all this means is that this is a useful taster, and introduction to the issues, the places and questions to consider in exploring the fashion-urban relationship, but it should not be taken as anywhere near the last word (something I suspect the contributors and editors would agree with); rather it should be seen as methodological and disciplinary set of hints of where we need to go to make more sense not only of fashions’ urban past but also its changing presents – it is after all the ever changing world of fashion.