Mediating Fashion

This project aims at investigating the Danish fashion industry by untraditional means: Instead of analyzing either the aesthetic and cultural content of Danish fashion, or performing a traditional business oriented industry analysis, the project aims at investigating the practices that translates aesthetics and business, producers and consumers as well as practices and products from heterogeneous, unrelated entities, into a coherent network. It is a basic claim that the industry is held together by mediating actors (often actors involved in aesthetic communication, such as magazines, fashion fairs, public relations agencies), that works continuously on making the industry coherent and functional. Aesthetics and industry; producers and consumers are thus not seen as separates, but as co-constitutive. The project will differ from more traditional research attempts at combining e.g. culture and economics (for instance research done on "experience economy"), by its methods, which will focus on practices, rather than macro-structures.
Theoretically, the project aims at building bridges between cultural studies and business studies by means of practice-oriented methods - found in pragmatism and STS (Science and Technology Studies). This bridge-building will constitute a profound theoretical contribution. Moreover, the study will provide profoundly new empirical knowledge of the fashion business - Denmark's fourth largest - by focusing on a new set of actors. Neither producers or consumers will take centre stage, rather focus will be on the actors placed between them, ensuring that the contact is functional. Last, the study will make a strategic contribution, pinpointing best practices in the fashion industry, thus providing tools for securing and stabilizing the success currently experienced by the Danish fashion industry.
In carrying out the study, the project aims at making qualitative studies of the fashion industry, interviewing and observing significant actors (industry organizations, organizers of fashion fairs, public relations and communication agencies, fashion magazines and journalists, modelling and styling agencies and fashion educations).