ABSTRACT
The subject of this chapter is that part of the British fashion industry associated with the creative work of fashion designers who have been trained in the art schools. In chapter 1, I proposed that we envisage this sector as a gossamer-fine piece of fabric of great luxury, tossed rather carelessly between two pillars of support. On the one side is the great insititutional edifice of the art schools, the public sector of training and education, and on the other side, the commercial sector, in particular the magazines with their enormous readerships and lavish advertisements, a field of spectacular visual display and consumption. In the following five chapters I look more closely at those practices which, when considered together, can be compared to a piece of delicate fabric, a finely spun piece of silk or gossamer. This ‘fabric’ also forms the main body of ‘material’ for the book as a whole. This focuses upon the employment of young designers in the British fashion industry. I ask three questions: What kind of industry is it? How do graduates in fashion design navigate a course for themselves in this volatile field? What is the labour process of fashion design? The aim is to describe and analyse what it is like to work in fashion. There is, to date, no existing picture of what the industry actually comprises, what employment or self-employment opportunities are available, and how these come to be occupied. There are a few journalistic attempts to explain the peculiarities of the United Kingdom fashion design sector, and the occasional report such as that undertaken by the Kurt Salmon Group in 1991 on behalf of the British Fashion Council (Salmon 1991). (This latter will be considered in detail in chapter 9.) In the first instance, it is useful to address the explanations commonly found in fashion journalism since these regularly attempt to explain the perceived failings of the fashion industry: Why is there such a disparity between its international visibility and the economic returns? Why do so many of the most talented designers go bankrupt within a few years of leaving college? Why are ‘we’ not able to make more of this indigenous talent?
