Abstract
The aim of this article is to examine the qualification and mediation offashionable clothing by fashion buyers at Selfridges, London. The author examinesthe ‘active and reflexive role of economic agents in the qualification of products’in their ‘habitual and routine’ working practices, describing how buyers are activein defining, shaping, transforming, qualifying and requalifiying products.Through this qualification process, buyers act upon markets, their selectionsresulting in the assemblage of products on the shop-floor that constitute fashion-able clothing for the store. One problem with this idea of qualification is that itviews the process as linear. To overcome this, the author draws on Cronin’s ideaof ‘multiple regimes of mediation’, which emphasizes the many directions andmediations that take place between agents in their qualification of products. Todemonstrate this, the author examines three critical encounters buyers have withproducts, suppliers and consumers. During these encounters, buyers mediatenumerous interests, tastes and identities, deal with suppliers and come to ‘know’their customer(s). Focusing on these encounters provides, in the words of Cronin,for an ‘expanded and nuanced definition of mediation’ and critical analysis offashion buyers as, to borrow Bourdieu’s term, ‘cultural intermediaries’ whosework has been hitherto unexamined.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 704-724 |
| Number of pages | 20 |
| Journal | Cultural Sociology |
| Volume | 54 |
| Issue number | 5 |
| Publication status | Published - 2006 |