‘It Was a Huge Shock'

Michael Arthur’s concept of boundaryless careers is an inherently ambivalent notion (Arthur 1994; Arthur and Rousseau 1996; Sullivan and Arthur 2006). In bringing together ‘physical’ inter firm mobility with the ‘psychological’ development of competences, it zooms in on the two-way interrelationship between industry and individual. On the one hand, structural labor market changes affect the individual’s sense of agency and competence; on the other hand, employee mobility affects organizations. Looking at fashion designers through such a lens is appropriate because they have never sat well in organizations (McRobbie 1998).