ABSTRACT
It has been difficult to find a single, over-arching, theoretical framework from within existing scholarship which would comfortably contain this current study of work and livelihoods in fashion. Creative labour has been overlooked in media and cultural studies in recent years to the point that almost everything but work has been the subject of extensive attention. One exception to this is Garnham’s study of the culture industries, where he briefly considers that aspect of the culture industry labour market which has figured most prominently here-the freelance, ‘independent’, creative young workers willing to work long hours for low, sometimes no, pay (Garnham 1987). Deploying a conventional Marxist vocabulary, he sees this phenomenon as the ultimate sign of the triumph of contemporary capitalism which is able to milk the talent of young people, getting them to shoulder all the risks without even offering them a proper job or contract: ‘Often labour is not waged at all, but labour power is rented out for a royalty’. He continues: ‘…the workers willingly themselves don this yoke in the name of freedom’ (Garnham 1987:33). While Garnham is absolutely right to see this no pay economy as a product of deregulation and sub-contracting in the increasingly competitive culture industries, where capital manages to unburden itself of everything except a minimum responsibility to labour, my emphasis here is in examining these types of working practice in more detail. With references being made to the idea of working unpaid for ‘experience’ and for ‘exposure’ at almost every point in the fashion field, I question why this happens. What Garnham sees as a regrettable feature of the inexorable processes of capitalism, I consider as an integral, emergent (if also regrettable) but by now, in the late 1990s, an almost predictable feature of the working practices of cultural capitalism. If Fredric Jameson has examined at length the products of such a system, the flickering images dispatched across the globe, one of the aims here has been to untangle some of the complicated features of the labour and production processes which underpin this creative economy(Jameson 1984).
