7. The precarity of the in between - Giulia Mensitieri

Europe and Fashion: Questioning Identities and Cultures. EFHA Conference 2018

Fashion occupies a central place in the economies and in the imaginaries of the contemporary capitalism and has become, since the valorization of ‘creative labour’ in the neoliberal economy, a desirable professional horizon. In fact, fashion creative labour provides a desirable professional status despite the precarious conditions of labour. Through an ethnographic study among creative workers in Paris and in Brussels (models, fashion designers, stylist, journalists, interns...) this paper explores the ‘material translation’ and the spatial circulations – in the city and in private spaces – of the double geography that characterize fashion workers’ everyday life. Fashion workers circulate in the ‘overexposed’ spaces of the great luxury as well as in the one of the precarity made opaques. By focusing on the co-existence of these two antithetical social and symbolic geographies, the paper will also explore on the construction of subjectivities of fashion creative workers.