The Cultural Economy of Fashion Buying

Abstract

The aim of this article is to examine the qualification and mediation of fashionable clothing by fashion buyers at Selfridges, London. The author examines the ‘active and reflexive role of economic agents in the qualification of products’ in their ‘habitual and routine’ working practices, describing how buyers are active in defining, shaping, transforming, qualifying and requalifiying products. Through this qualification process, buyers act upon markets, their selections resulting in the assemblage of products on the shop-floor that constitute fashionable clothing for the store. One problem with this idea of qualification is that it views the process as linear. To overcome this, the author draws on Cronin's idea of ‘multiple regimes of mediation’, which emphasizes the many directions and mediations that take place between agents in their qualification of products. To demonstrate this, the author examines three critical encounters buyers have with products, suppliers and consumers. During these encounters, buyers mediate numerous 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 of fashion buyers as, to borrow Bourdieu's term, ‘cultural intermediaries’ whose work has been hitherto unexamined.