Who are you kidding? Children, fashion and consumption

The study of consumption has grown almost exponentially over recent decades. This expansion has developed over an increasingly multidisciplinary terrain including anthropology, economics, history, geography and literature as well as sociology, covering topics as diverse as shopping and identity, processes of commodification, marketing and the role of psychoanalysis, the critique of utilitarian economics, and the relationship of consumer culture to postmodernism (see, for example: Bowlby, 1993; Featherstone, 1991; Fine and Leopold, 1993; Jackson et al., 2001; McKendrick et al., 1982; Miller et al., 1987; Slater, 1997). Despite this, empirical research in the area of consumption remains

relatively under-developed, although perhaps addressed more fully through the recent launch of the Journal of Consumer Culture and the ESRC’s Cultures of Consumption initiative, of which more later. One key exception has been Bourdieu’s study of Parisian lifestyle choices in Distinction (Bourdieu, 1984). The influence of Bourdieu in the area has been immense and, in particular, his analysis of the role of cultural intermediaries such as designers, advertisers and magazine editors in defining styles, social groupings and social divisions centred on consumption practices (see, for example, Cronin, 2004; Nava et al., 1997; Nixon, 1996). A second and recent dimension of research into consumption has had a primarily ethnographic focus, particularly on households and domestic consumption, seeing consumption practices and meanings as generated within and out of household relations (see, for example, Miller et al., 1998). This chapter draws on a jointly held research project entitled New

Consumers: Children, Fashion and Consumption funded by the ESRC/AHRB under its Cultures of Consumption Initiative, conducted between 2003 and 2006. The project sought to draw on each of these strands of research through an analysis of the role of cultural intermediaries such as buyers and retailers, including formal interviews, and through a more ethnographic and longitudinal investigation into the consumption of children’s fashion within a small sample of seven families. In doing so it aimed to provide some insight into the overall “loop”, or interconnected nature of, production and consumption,

seeing children’s consumption of fashion as resulting from both push (advertising, marketing and lifestyle initiatives) and pull (pleasure, desire and appropriation) factors as part of an overall “circuit of culture” (Johnson, 1986). Within this the study also aimed to investigate some of the processes of inclusion and exclusion that underplay children’s consumption of fashion goods according to key variables of social class/income and geography/access. Following this emphasis upon the “looping” of the production and consumption of children’s fashion, this chapter draws on interviews conducted with representatives of the fashion industry including store managers, product managers and company buyers. Fifteen interviews were conducted during the period of 2004-6, composed of five interviews with supermarkets and the so-called “value end” of the market, four with the independent, top or designer label driven end of the market, two with sports shops, two with leading high street multiples, and two with those involved with the marketing of children’s fashion more widely. Despite immense media interest in children and fashion, most notoriously in

the rise of the so-called “tweenager”, and a growing market in children’s clothing and accessories now estimated to be worth around £6 billion in the UK alone, social science literature and research on fashion shows a glaring neglect of children and fashion (Mintel, 2008). This is mostly due to its heavy emphasis upon gender, whether in the form of feminism (Craik, 1994; Entwistle, 2000; Wilson, 1985) or the New Man (Edwards, 1997; Mort, 1996; Nixon, 1996) or alternatively upon youth subcultures (Hebdige, 1979; McRobbie, 1989; Nava, 1992). The exception here has been marketing and retail management driven studies of consumer behaviour which have increasingly turned their attention toward the role of children in relation to branding, product choice or wider family dynamics (Elliot and Leonard, 2004; Grant and Stephen, 2005; Harper, Dewar and Diack, 2003; Hogg, Bruce and Hill, 1998). The limits of such behaviourally driven studies for social science analysis are clear as they tend to either under-theorise the subject and or imply a rational choice model that elides wider consideration of social and structural constraints. The study and analysis of children’s fashion is, to say the least, disparate.

Recent years have seen an expanding literature on the sociology of childhood, major developments in the study of consumer culture and a small, but wellestablished and interdisciplinary, analysis of fashion. Despite this, consideration of children’s fashion or even children as consumers remains rather thin with some exceptions (Hood-Williams, 1990; James, Jenks and Prout, 1998; Kline, 1995; Swain, 2002; Wyness, 2000). One key example here is the work of Dan Cook which I will consider shortly (Cook, 2003, 2004). However, there would appear to be several reasons for this situation. First, the study of fashion is – as cited in Chapter 1 – rather split between the analysis of dress, or what people wear when and how, and the analysis of fashion per se as a phenomenon of social change, or the processes by which style and taste

shift and develop in relation to any number of goods, commodities or services (Craik, 1994; Edwards, 1997; Wilson, 1985). The difficulty here is that it also reflects a wider disciplinary rift between seeing fashion as a matter of dress (as seen within the arts and design) and seeing fashion as a phenomenon of social change (as seen within the social sciences). Within this, children’s fashion as a topic per se is almost entirely lost as either an un-theorised subsection of costume history or as a tiny variable within a wider sea of social and economic analysis. It is particularly remarkable that the study of fashion has in many ways almost entirely neglected questions of aging. Given its relationship to the body this is striking; yet the body itself often maintains a near absent presence within the analysis of fashion as Entwistle has noted (Entwistle, 2000). A second dimension here is the tendency of literatures on consumption to

construct the category of the consumer as unproblematic (Edwards, 2000). Whilst variables of class, race and gender are often considered, once again age is often left out other than to consider the particular plight of the elderly as an excluded group or possessors of “grey power” in market terms (Cahill, 1994). This is only partly explained in relation to children’s relative lack of autonomy as consumers and is more a reflection of the wider tendency of sociological literatures on consumption to treat consumers as a homogenous group. More deeply, as I have argued previously, analysis of consumption is often caught between more economic and more cultural explanations that emphasise either class and income or identity and style as key variables (Edwards, 2000). All of these variables, however, are problematic in relation to children whose position in all respects is often inextricably bound up with that of their elders and, furthermore, considered only in those “adult” terms. Third, one might expect the sociology of childhood to move the topic

forward here but there is a strong tendency for the analysis of children to become caught up in wider debates about agency and structure whereby children become either the plastic constructions of history or seen as increasingly significant agents of some sort. In neither case is children’s uniqueness as “clothes wearers” particularly apparent. The study of childhood often shows a tendency towards overly macro considerations of the role of children as merely the constructed subjects of history. Studies such as those by Aries and wider applications of the work of Foucault strongly emphasise the historical construction of childhood itself as an essentially modern and western phenomenon, bound up with the advancement of industrialisation and the role of the state (Aries, 1962; Ashenden, 2004). Whilst such studies play a crucial role in undermining the attempt to either render childhood a universal and biologically driven entity or as an inherent state of innocence they also tend to render children passive objects of history with little subjectivity or agency. A more recent sociology of childhood has begun to challenge these notions and to understand childhood as a more unique and rounded part of human development (James, Jenks and Prout, 1998; Wyness, 2000). The tendency, however,

for the sociology of childhood to inculcate debates concerning the power and agency of children often sheds little light on the importance of dress or children’s relationship with clothing. One exception, perhaps, is the work of Dan Cook (Cook, 2004). Through a

thorough-going analysis of trade journals and similar retail sources throughout the twentieth century in the US, Cook attempts to simultaneously construct and unpack the intertwining of the rise of the child as an agent and as a separate group that potentially has rights and needs protection from other groups, and childhood itself as a commodity enmeshed within the growth of the market in advanced western industrial capitalist societies. Fundamental in Cook’s analysis is the assertion that the economic, moral and political dimensions of constructing the child and childhood are inseparable: “a view of the child consumer as always, already embedded in market relations” (Cook, 2004: 5). This potentially sets up a notion of the child consumer as a mere passive victim of market forces or what Cook calls “market invasion” perspectives. Implicit within this is Cook’s repeated, yet rarely unpacked, use of the concept of “discourse” to understand the construction of childhood and the child consumer. Thus, although rarely made explicit, Cook’s perspective is fundamentally a Foucauldian analysis of the construction of the child and the consumer and thus, in essence, not far removed from the work of Aries (Aries, 1962). What is more unique here is his emphasis on the enmeshing of moral and economic dimensions and his clear demonstration of these connections through archival research. The subjectivity and agency of children, however, develops into little more than a ghostly presence here. Thus the problem that remains, over and over again, is one of agency and structure in understanding children as passive or active consumers, a theme echoed in some of the findings from the work carried out with the fashion industry to which I now turn.