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

There have been endless studies mapping the iniquities of globalised capital, especially the employment practices of the garment industry in the Third World. Yet even as women (and others) in outsourced sweat shops suffer a form of modern–day bondage, women in developed nations are carving out new careers in the fashion industry as mid–level entrepreneurial designers. Operating between the spectacular pleonasms of haute couture and ubiquitous ‘designer diffusion’ lines such as DKNY, these artisans of ‘high casual’ fashion evince a number of features of late capitalism, such as ‘creative cities’, cultural mediation and ‘work–style’ businesses that are distinctively gendered. At the heart of this volume, which focuses in depth on the dynamics of independent fashion design in New Zealand, lies the assertion that there exist as–yet untraced links between the entry of first world women into paid employment, and the wider processes of globalisation. This revealing study of New Zealand fashion demonstrates that economic globalisation, the movement of middle–class women into the labour force, and the changing structure of the fashion industry are not only coterminous but intrinsically connected.

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

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 globalisation, 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.