ABSTRACT
The chapter presents the main aims of the book. It wants to investigate the lived experiences of salespersons in the so-called “fast fashion” industry, a retail sector made of large chains of stores selling fashion garments at low/moderate prices. Within such stores, the workers’ role is considered quite marginal. The book aims at investigating how this marginality and the standardization of work are lived by salespersons and whether such factors negatively impact the meaning of work and increase workers’ alienation. Mass fashion clothing retail is a sector dominated by large multinationals with hundreds of stores across the globe. The book aims at investigating also how lived working experiences differ in two contexts—New York (the US) and Milan (Italy)—that are deeply different in terms of labor regulation and industrial relations and in terms of job mobility and employment levels.
The chapter then illustrates the characteristics of the fast-fashion industry and describes how the stores are organized and what salespersons usually do. A presentation of the research and a summary of the main results follow. The chapter explains also what a research focused on fast fashion can more generally tell us about low-skilled workers in the service societies.
