Overview

British Fashion Design explores the tensions between fashion as art form, and the demands of a ruthlessly commercial industry. Based on interviews and research conducted over a number of years, Angela McRobbie charts the flow of art school fashion graduates into the industry; their attempts to reconcile training with practice, and their precarious position between the twin supports of the education system and the commercial sector. Stressing the social context of cultural production, McRobbie focuses on British fashion and its graduate designers as products of youth street culture, and analyses how designers from diverse backgrounds have created a labour market for themselves, remodelling enterprise culture to suit their own careers. Incorporating a diverse range of concerns and debates, from the art/craft distinction and the idea of the artist, to issues of education and gender issues, British Fashion Design is an original and broad-ranging study of the economic, ideological and artistic workings of a dynamic and fast-moving industry.

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9780415057813

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This book extends the important work Angela McRobbie has done over the past decades in studying young women's subcultures and popular women's magazines to help feminize British cultural studies. The book is instructive not only about the struggles of young women to become 'new cultural workers' under the Thatcherite regime of enterprise culture, but also about the relative strengths and weaknesses of a type of social analysis whose growing popularity poses a challenge to disciplinary sociology. <br>-- Mark Jacobs, American Journal of Sociology <br>

British Fashion Design is a diligent and illumination sociological study of the careers of fashion designers. McRobbie has made out a strong case for attending more closely to cultural production - Jim McGuigan, New Times 'McRobbie is to be congratulated on providing business historians with a perspective on the fashion industry her book is well written and the organisation of the material is faultless.' - Katrina Honeyman, Business History, 41(3) 'A fascinating and skillfully narrated story of a creative workforce and its relation to contemporary British capitalism ... a wonderfully readable addition to any undergraduate course on contemporary industries, or on gender and employment.' - Nina Wakeford, Work, Employment and Society, June 2000

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Angela McRobbie

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