ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the imagery of fashion is implicated in the organization of its production process. While some of us have recently stressed the ways in which gendered organization is working itself into lives in increasingly subtle and contradictory ways, the accounts examined in the chapter remind us that its brutalism has far from evaporated. These are tragedies of fashion, of the fashion industry, and of sexualized work and gendered organization under the globalized regime of contemporary capitalism. Although the humanities might dwell on the imagery that cloaks the tragic reality, they also insist on the importance of the individual story, the specific experience and the apparently extreme case. They convince us that the extreme case cannot be brushed off as a mere exception to the rule. The one story, and the one image, re-present reality, even if their correlation cannot be verified in line with the epistemic criteria of science.
