Collaboration, competition and conflict: The collective labour of fashion photography at US Vogue (1940–42)

While the figure of the fashion photographer has been widely discussed, little has been written on image-making as a collective endeavour. Fashion photography indeed results from technical innovations, publishing strategies, editorial policies, behind-the-scenes negotiations and, ultimately, decision-making. This article analyses ‘The Condé Nast Papers’ – a series of internal documents held at the Condé Nast archives in New York – together with US Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar’s editorials and covers to explore how fashion photographs resulted from the collective labour of photographers, editors, artistic directors and many others in the early 1940s. Through these unique historical sources, this article gives a voice to the workers involved in the making of fashion images and shows how decision-making and creativity were distributed across occupations. It also unpacks the negotiations, arbitrations and power relations that underpinned work relations at US Vogue, showing the collaboration, competition and conflict between the different actors. Drawing on art sociologist Howard Becker’s concept of ‘art worlds’ while combining methods from fashion history and visual and material culture, I question the respective status of the multiple authors involved in this activity and the conventions of fashion image-making. In doing so, I argue that fashion photographs are the product of the interactions of a multitude of workers who are embedded in the power structures of the fashion media industry, and whose collective labour is made invisible. My goal is to rethink the ways in which collective labour has been evidenced and produced in the fashion industry.

‘My favourite meme page’: Balenciaga’s Instagram account and audience fashion labour online

As fashion ‘goes viral’, adapting to digital popular cultural flows, streams, image aggregations and memes, there is a need for better grasping how these platforms feed into the aesthetics of mediations of fashion. Contemporary digitally mediated fashion is conditioned by what van Dijck and Poell refer to as a new media logic, one that permeates the ‘strategies, mechanisms, and economics underpinning these platforms’ dynamics’. This logic includes audience labour. This article focuses on how the audience is put to work and how such work becomes integral to the mediational aesthetic by using the Instagram account of Paris-based fashion brand Balenciaga as a heuristic device. In connecting perspectives from fashion and media studies, this article discusses how fashion mediation is entangled in processes that harness audience labour on Instagram. Balenciaga takes on communication strategies that expose the aesthetics of user engagement. On Instagram, the brand presents its take on fashion photography in the digital age as part of its visual identity on this platform. Furthermore, in feeding the comments section, users participate in ‘boundary maintenance’, separating Balenciaga insiders from outsiders who lack knowledge of the perpetually changing aesthetic codes of fashion imagery. Online audiences thus find themselves at the crossroads of consumption, production and gatekeeping.

Age, experience and creative labour: Narratives of creative professionals over age 55 in the New York fashion industry

This qualitative study introduces six creative fashion professionals, aged 55–74, who started their careers in the 1980s. They have managed to overcome the complex challenges of employment and remain active in the highly competitive and youth-centric fashion industry of New York City. The participants represent key occupations that drive the behind-the-scenes creative force in the industry’s supply chain. While their long careers have equipped them with expertise, multiple transferable hard and soft skills and extensive professional networks, they have become a rare age demographic in the industry. We investigate the importance of professional experience that comes with age in the current workforce by exploring the participants’ self-reflections and assessments about their careers as ageing workers. We determine how exogenous factors such as globalization, trade agreements, changes in technology, the effect of politics and recessions, global health crises and endogenous factors, such as changes in positions, additional training and work–life balance, have influenced their careers. We highlight the benefits of intergenerational teams in which older workers are effectively able to transfer knowledge to and collaborate with younger co-workers and vice versa. Employing insights of the theory of experience, continuity theory, social exchange theory and generational theory, the study shows that intergenerational collaboration is critical to mastering creative processes in the fashion and textiles industry. Our research uncovers this demographic’s collective experience, tacit knowledge and resilience and proclaims their passion for their professions. It also illuminates the strategies the participants employed to remain professionally relevant as they adapted to the shifting landscape of the global fashion industry.

Labouring up and down Prisunic’s styling streams: The creative studio of a retail chain in 1960s France

This article looks at the French retail chain Prisunic’s fashion production in the 1960s and, in particular, at the collective and invisible labour of its creative studio established in 1953. It examines the processes by which Prisunic evolved from selling clothes, infamous for their shabbiness, to selling fashion during the 1960s. First, this article focuses on the organization of Prisunic. Second, it turns to the interactions between Prisunic as a fashion producer and cultural intermediaries such as forecasting agencies. Specifically, it analyses how Maïmé Arnodin’s ‘colour books’ became instrumental to Prisunic’s design process. Third, it considers the diversity of occupations within the studio, including stylist, fashion designer, fashion photographer, graphic designer and typographer, and considers their interactions. Fourth, the article delves into the interpersonal relations of studio members with fashion journalists and editors, as well as structural interactions between fashion producers and fashion media. Especially, it questions the role of French Elle in the visual and discursive construction of Prisunic’s commodities as the product of creative labour. The article draws on sociologist Michel Callon’s focus on ‘agencies’ and ‘material devices’, which are instrumental in shaping markets and the cultural economy. Further, it builds on sociologist Liz McFall’s characterization of material devices as shaped by the interaction of institutional, organizational and technological arrangements to analyse the studio’s labour practices within Prisunic, upstream with its suppliers and downstream with the press. This article traces the processes, interactions and arrangements that make up Prisunic’s styling streams.

‘No, YOU make it!’: Outsourcing production to fashion consumers to mediate labour

This practice-based article examines an attempt to reconnect fashion labour with value, after the fast fashion system increased the gap between the two. Developed by Norwegian fashion brand and collective platform HAiKw/ (Harald Lunde Helgesen and Ida Falck Øien), the Drop-in Factory was a fashion design experiment conducted at the non-profit art space Kunsthall Oslo in 2019. In this experiment, labour was outsourced to consumers-visitors, who by contract paid for equipment rental and training, earning ‘Factory Coins’ that could only be spent on the finished product. Inviting amateurs to make their own garment in a workshop setting has become a common strategy of design activism in fashion. However, instead of focusing on teaching individuals craft expertise, the Drop-in Factory explored collective making practices in an industrial-like environment, inspired by manufacturing and scientific management. Tensions arose over pay when some participants felt that their labour was unfairly compensated. As a response, roleplaying emerged from the experiment. Interviews of participants, conducted months later, incidentally echoed roleplay debriefing sessions. Their accounts show that they acquired labour literacy and embodied knowledge of fashion manufacturing, which extended to contracts and remuneration. While it remains unclear whether the Drop-in Factory led participants to revalue fashion labour, audience participation itself became the mediation of fashion labour.

Class and creativity in fashion education: A comparison of the pedagogies of making and design at British technical schools and art and design schools, 1870s–1950s

Discourses of creativity play a crucial role in shaping cultural perceptions of what constitutes creative labour, who performs it and where it is located. This article explores the historical role that businesses, policy-makers and education providers played as co-producers of discourses about creativity in British fashion and textile design education. Beginning with the emergence of new vocational courses for textile design and manufacture in the 1870s, it traces how the language used to describe conceptions of creativity evolved in relation to educational provision for textiles, dressmaking and, later, fashion over the first half of the twentieth century. During this period, creativity became associated with labour related to designing fashion and textile goods – such as illustration – rather than the labour of making them. This shift resulted from the establishment of fashion and textile design as respected courses within art and design schools, which backed the ideal of a professional designer. It was implemented at the expense of, and with the effect of undermining the creative labour of staff and students in vocational trade schools. As a result, this article challenges the idea that the development of fashion and textile design courses in art and design schools democratized the creative labour of design in the British fashion industry by opening opportunities for the middle-classes. Rather, it finds that discourses around creative labour worked to exclude the creativity of the predominantly working-class students at technical schools, with long-term implications for the relationship between socio-economic status and access to the creative industries.