ABSTRACT
Defensive strategies of returning to the sources consist in turning against the dominant figures the very principles in the name of which they justify their domination. These struggles between the establishment and the young pretenders, the challengers, who, as in boxing, have to ‘make all the running’, take all the risks, are the basis of the changes which occur in the field of haute couture. The opposition between right and left, rear guard and avant-garde, the consecrated and the heretical, orthodoxy and heterodoxy, constantly changes in content but remains structurally identical. The creator’s signature is a mark that changes not the material nature, but the social nature of the object. Like the field of the social classes and of lifestyles, the field of production has a structure that is the product of its earlier history and the principle of its subsequent history.
