Romantic opportunism: Doing the work of structures in post-feminist creative industries

Abstract

This article contributes to feminist cultural studies on the creative industries by offering an ethnographic account of the lifeworld of a female and creative entrepreneur. Drawing on interview data and ethnographic observations collected over the course of 10 years, I offer a thick description of the personal and professional trajectories of Alexandra, through the rise and fall of her fashion brand and first marriage and on to her second marriage and new job as an employee for a marketing firm. I focus on the ways in which she becomes her own microstructure, building connection between love and career in a de-regulated and de-territorialised environment. I argue that she engages in what I call ‘romantic opportunism’, a biographical device that enables her to spot instrumental connections between different dimensions of life, whilst unifying them into a romantic plot. The story of Alexandra can therefore be seen as an instantiation of ‘freelance feminism’, whereby life emerges as the combination of parallel and interdependent projects.

Introduction: life histories in creative and culture industries research

This article is an interview-based narrative ethnography (Hampshire et al., 2014) of the personal and professional trajectory of a female fashion designer and entrepreneur. It offers a literary thick description of her path through the rise and fall of her business and first marriage, and on to her second marriage and early motherhood, across three countries. By following the life of one individual, I aim to illustrate the value of biographical methods for the study of creative and culture industries (CCIs). While the focus on individual stories is quite an established practice in anthropology (Biehl, 2005; Crapanzano, 1980; Desjarlais, 2003; Gubrium and Holstein, 2008) which has recently gained traction also in other fields of the humanities and social sciences (Renders, 2016), in CCI, literature is still rather underused, with some exceptions (Bandinelli, 2019; Mensitieri, 2018). This is surprising, especially if we consider that CCI scholarship has repeatedly flagged up how these are highly de-institutionalised, de-politicised and de-territorialised fields, in which individuals have to compensate for the lack of structure.

In particular, I set to investigate the work that individuals have to do to become ‘their own microstructures’ (McRobbie, 2002) in an increasingly deregulated employment context.

The analysis reveals the importance of an attitude which I call ‘romantic opportunism’: a biographical dispositif that allows the spotting of connections between different domains of life – typically, love and work – in the attempt to ‘have it all’. ‘Romantic opportunism’ is a construct that combines opportunistic ethos and romantic plot. In so far as it permits the forging of an instrumental connection between love and career, it can be seen as a response to the post-feminist injunction of making everything (from business plans to babies) passionately, wholeheartedly and with little or no institutional support. I regard this attitude as an instantiation of ‘freelance feminism’, understood as the process whereby one ‘becomes a woman’ by relating to different dimensions of life as parallel projects that are re-composed within a narrative of self-realisation.

Importantly, the biographical method does not erase the possibility of identifying general patterns, but rather allows us to do so from the point of view of the subject (Clandinin, 2013). By telling the story of a person, in this person’s words, we can see how the social, economic, cultural and political context is reflected, perceived and negotiated. The individual, far from being a limit to the understanding of society, becomes an embodied medium for its analysis. The narration of Alexandra’s story, as for every narrative, is deeply personal – because it is a unique composition of her experiences and their meaning – and always already relational and intersubjective because every narrative stems from and is informed by the wider social, cultural and economic context which is shared with others (Clandinin, 2013).

As a matter of fact, the narrative that I propose in this article contains and is rooted in a wider social and cultural understanding. Indeed, even though I do not explicitly refer to other participants, the formal and informal conversations I have had with Alexandra took place in parallel with two larger research projects on the creative industries (see Bandinelli, 2019, 2020 and McRobbie et al., 2022). The codes and categories I have used to make sense and reflect upon Alexandra’s story developed in relation to the findings of multiple other interviews and ethnographic observations with independent designers and creative entrepreneurs.

This article is structured as follows. First, I offer some methodological and ethical notes, reflecting my involvement in the fieldwork and the role of the participant as a co-producer of knowledge. Second, I review key debates on post-feminist creative industries focusing on the work romance and the expectation of ‘having it all’. I then proceed to the empirical part, which is divided into three sections, corresponding, roughly, to three phases of Alexandra’s story: her relocation to Milan and the relationship with Giovanni, her first husband; the launch and development of her fashion microenterprise; her new life in the US with a baby, a ‘day job’ and Ethan, her second husband. I then proceed to the concluding remarks.

Methodological and ethical reflections

My relationship with Alexandra developed over 10 years. I met her in 2012 in a small village in the South of Italy, where I was attending a summer school. At the time, she was doing her PhD, and so was I. We were part of the same academic network, and over the years, we met again in various occasions. Gradually, we established a dialogue which was focused mainly on Alexandra’s professional trajectory. Her experience was quite relevant to my doctoral project on creative entrepreneurs. In 2014, I conducted the first exploratory interview, centred on her work as a fashion designer. I soon realised it was impossible to talk about her career without considering her personal life. The two are interrelated and co-dependent, and in Alexandra’s narrative, as in that of many women and creative workers, they are virtually indistinguishable. In our next recorded interviews, in 2014 and 2016, we considered exactly this entanglement. Typically, our in-person conversations would carry on over dinner and a drink or two; our professional and private personas also entangled, and academic interviews led to friendly chats, which in their turn offered insights which we would further explore in subsequent interviews. The last one to date took place as a video call in 2022. The interviews’ length varied between 60 and 90 minutes. In the periods in which we did not speak, I followed Alexandra’s life on Facebook and YouTube. She is very active on social media and enjoys sharing, which allowed me to be pretty much updated on the main events in her life.

This kind of ethnography poses two main ethical challenges: (1) how to disguise a participant’s identity and (2) how to avoid an exploitative dynamic whereby the researcher is the only one in control of the ‘story’. To tackle the first issue, Alexandra has been pseudonymised, and some details have been altered. Despite this effort, it has been impossible to fully ‘hide’ the person behind the participant. In fact, the potential of the biographical method relies on its ability to show the complexities of an embodied and emplaced human being. Rather than aspiring to build an impersonal analysis – which would defeat the very purpose of the study – I have been wanting to create a shared narrative, which stems from the joint efforts of both researcher and participant. To this end, during the whole research, I shared work in progress with Alexandra, who offered her feedback and critique. ¹ She actively contributed to the writing phase, reviewing drafts of the manuscripts, pointing out parts that did not reflect her reality, suggesting alterations and amendments. I revised the manuscript accordingly, implementing all suggestions until it reached its final state and obtained Alexandra’s written consent for publication.

In this process, knowledge was produced collaboratively. It was not crafted by me as the researcher analysing her as the participant; rather it originated as part of a dialogue that unfolded in the context of a relationship of trust which also contains elements of friendship (Cotterill, 1992; Oakley, 2016). In this methodological horizon, participants are co-producers of knowledge, instead of ‘objects’ for academic observation (Goodall, 2000). Moreover, following a feminist epistemology that challenges ‘gentlemanly social science’ (Savage, 2010: 93), I have not regarded the personal and emotional involvement of researcher as a problem but have approached it as a way to put the subjective into knowledge production. This has opened up the space for reflexive thinking and writing that shows (instead of hiding) the ways in which the researcher has been affected in and by the exchanges with the participant. As can be noticed within these coordinates, the idea of the ethnographer as a detached observant, far from being an ideal to aspire to, emerges not only as methodologically inadequate but also ethically problematic (e.g. Bhattacharya, 2009).

In consideration of the above, the aim of this article is not to reveal ‘general’ truth by forcing theoretical interpretations into the life of another woman. What I want to do instead is to offer a dialogical narrative of the empirical research which involved both Alexandra and I in the quest for understanding what it may mean to be a woman and an entrepreneur in the contemporary creative industries.

Gendering the creative industries

Previously seen as an instrumental money-making activity, repetitive and alienating by default, work in post-Fordist societies has been redefined as the royal road for self-expression, and even joy. As feminist researchers have pointed out, the utopia of turning work into ‘something closer to a life of enthusiasm and enjoyment’ (McRobbie, 2002: 5) has been particularly attractive for young women in the 1980s and 1990s, the first in their families who could see the possibility of opting out of ‘normal work’ (McRobbie, 2016). As Angela McRobbie, drawing on Deleuze, puts it:

Romance . . . is the ‘line of flight’[,] the desire to escape a lifetime of routine work, let us say in a local taxation office, or in life insurance (albeit with a university degree) and the wish to lead a self-directed life in regard to work and career (McRobbie, 2016: 38).

While the idealised conception of work as a mode of self-expression is at stake in broader sectors of the economy, creative work represents the most accurate actualisation of this spectacular marriage between love and business, for the discourses of the creative industries revolve around ‘doing what one loves’ (Conor et al., 2015; Gill, 2002; Gregg, 2008; McRobbie, 1998, 2002, 2016; Tokumitsu, 2014). The superimposition of the ideology of romance on the domain of work reflects the feminisation of the latter in two main ways. First, love as such has always been coded as a female remit. The mastering of the language of love, both erotic and familial, is a defining trait of the performance of traditional femininity. Second, the notion of work as self-expression is rooted in patriarchal visions of women’s domestic and reproductive labour (Hochschild, 1983, 2001; Hochschild and Machung, 2015). The assimilation of work into a personal vocation has justified the lack of a salary for women’s work of care (a matter far from being resolved), and in an analogous fashion, it justifies the lack of work security in the creative economy (Gill and Pratt, 2008; Gregg, 2008, 2009). These ‘counterposing forces of passionate versus precarious work’ mark the gender of the creative industries (McRobbie, 2016: 70).

This tension reflects both the achievements and shortcomings of second-wave liberal feminism. On the one hand, living the work romance has represented an opportunity for both middle- and working-class women to escape the drudgery of domestic labour, childbearing and low-skilled jobs. Yet, on the other hand, it has functioned as a dispositif for self-management, which validates ‘inequality regimes’ (Acker, 2006), obliging individuals to find biographical solutions to systemic problems (Banet-Weiser, 2012; Gill, 2008; McRobbie, 2020). When the relationship with work is not going well, women are compelled to wonder whether they are ‘good enough’, and how they can improve to achieve the fantasy of a good life (Berlant, 2008, 2011).

The promises of ‘passionate work’ are amplified by the digital media complex. As Miya Tokumitsu puts it, the ‘do what you love’ mantra is that which better encapsulates the social media cultural economy (Tokumitsu, 2014). It finds its origin in the macho Californian ideology of Silicon Valley (Barbrook and Cameron, 1996), yet digital entrepreneurship is characterised by the traditionally feminine domains of fashion, parenting and beauty, as well as the centrality of emotional, affective and relational labour (Gregg, 2008; Jarrett, 2014). It appeals to young women as a seemingly accessible trajectory into a career as a content creator; flexible working hours and the work-from-home arrangement are portrayed as an optimal solution for mothers and carers (Gregg, 2008; Jarrett, 2014; Luckman, 2013). This kind of ‘aspirational labour’ intended as a ‘forward-looking, carefully orchestrated and entrepreneurial form of creative cultural production’ (Duffy, 2015: 446) replicates the competitive ‘winner takes all’ scenario of the creative industries and exacerbates women’s precarity. At the same time, it offers the possibility of being visible and owning the reproduction of their image and brand.

At stake, there is a highly individualised, and entrepreneurialised female subject (Gill and Scharff, 2011; Littler, 2024), who embraces the post-feminist sensibility (Gill, 2007) through which women are empowered and expected to prioritise their own goals and aspirations, which may well encompass both building successful careers and being mothers and wives (McRobbie, 2020). Neoliberal feminism has re-signified maternity away from the image of ‘benefit-dependent single mother’ into an idea of entrepreneurial mother, an ‘active (en route to the gym) sexually confident motherhood’ (McRobbie, 2020: 13). The two domains of production and reproduction are not thought of as mutually exclusive anymore. Post-feminism’s injunctions want women to choose no more because they can ‘have it all’. Yet, while the enterprising woman can enjoy the emancipation from institutional chains which have restricted the lives of their mothers, grandmothers and female ancestors, they nonetheless have to do without any institutions.

The context that we are confronted with is characterised by the complex nexus between gender, work, love and technology. Post-feminist logic and digital media-governance organise this into a narrative whereby women can aspire to live the ‘romance of work’ if they embark on an enterprising process of subjectivation, which enables them to monetise their passion by means of digital infrastructures. Platforms should make up for the lack of capital and institutional support through affordances and various technologies of the self, such as creativity (McRobbie, 2016) confidence (Orgad and Gill, 2021) and resilience (McRobbie, 2020), articulated into a therapeutic-pedagogic apparatus of wellness and wellbeing (O’Neill, 2024), comprised of self-help books, inspirational stories, hashtag activism and self-care apps.

Various scholars have noticed how the utopia of ‘having it all’ is re-produced by a nuance of cruel optimism (Berlant, 2011), whereby suffering derives from holding on to one’s desire of living a structurally unachievable ‘good life’. I maintain this critique but shift the attention to the actual work that women do to build a life that is ‘good enough’ for them and to challenge and overcome the obstacles they encounter, bridging a gender gap that still has to be sealed. In what follows, I offer a ‘ground up’ narrative to unpack how the subject re-produces and conceives of the ‘work romance’ aspiring to ‘having it all’. I show that at stake, there is an existential act of composition and re-composition which relies on what I call romantic opportunism, a biographical dispositif that unites an instrumental ethos with a narrative of love. Life emerges as a freelance endeavour, an adventure made of different parallel projects which the individual tries to orchestrate and channel towards a utopian horizon of self-realisation.

How to build a destiny

The first time I interviewed Alexandra, in 2014, we met in an artisanal Gelateria in Via Paolo Sarpi, in the heart of Milan’s hipsterised borough of Chinatown. Alexandra ordered a chocolate cup, and I went for a pistachio cone. During an hour-long interview, she let her ice cream slowly melt until chocolate cream dripped on the pavement. She smoked five cigarettes, the long ones, and explained she had to grab the chance to do it when not home. Her partner did not want her to smoke. He would search her bag and smell her breath, so it was better for her to finish the whole packet now and suck a few menthol tablets on her way back. I was a little surprised. Why would she allow her partner to tell her off? Maybe those sneaked cigarettes were particularly good; she seemed to like them a lot. I smoked too, tobacco rollies.

Alexandra moved to Milan from Romania, and her Italian is nearly perfect. She is also fluent in English. My English was still clumsy then (it still is sometimes), and I felt jealous of her proficiency with languages. At the time of the interview, she had already defended her doctoral viva and started a career in fashion design. I was in the third year of my PhD. I wanted to become an academic, Alexandra did not. She was not emotionally attached to her doctoral studies.

Her ‘true love’ was another, which her parents would forbid.

I have always wanted to make clothes . . . When I was a child I used to steal my mother’s pieces of fabric to sew little dresses for my dolls. But at that time in Romania sewing was seen as ‘old fashioned’ and degrading. My parents were always telling me: You don’t have to sew! You have to study!

To account for the inception of her business, Alexandra deploys the narrative of romance. Sewing was a passion since a very early age, but, as in the classic romantic plot, there was an obstacle, that is, her parents. For them, the idea of a daughter who would work with her hands was reminiscent of the communist regime, where both men and women were to serve the state as workers in public jobs (Roman and Suciu, 2007). In contrast, the Western ideology of the creative industries deciphers craft and design as paths for successful careers. This generational conflict highlights the emancipatory potential that fashion has had for Alexandra, framing it as a force that drove her away from the place that was assigned to her by her family. While on the one hand, she arguably moved towards patterns of self-exploitation, but on the other hand, she did follow a desire to escape the common sense to which she was exposed during her childhood and adolescence.

The ‘work romance’ was, for Alexandra’s ‘line of flight’, a way to divert from what she perceived as her pre-established path to find her own. The narrative of love frames work as the litmus test for the subject’s uniqueness. Her love for fashion, coupled with an image of the West as a land of opportunities for creatives (Alacovska, 2018), brought Alexandra to migrate to Italy. She wanted to live in Milan because, she says, ‘Milan is the city of fashion’, an image which represents the city’s combination of high-end luxury fashion and a rising scene of industrious independent creatives (McRobbie et al., 2022). In a similar way, I migrated from Italy to the UK, attracted by the promise of a more fulfilling (and remunerative) academic life. One could say we both believed the neoliberal dream of realising our talents in countries with stronger economies, and in a way, we both did.

For 2010’s New Year’s Eve, Alexandra decided to organise a trip to Milan with a friend. Unexpectedly, the friend bailed out at the last minute, and Alexandra found herself with no travel companion. She reached out to the Italian tango community Facebook Group of which she was already a member. Alexandra used Facebook with pragmatism, to find a hook from which she could start building not only a short trip but maybe also a whole life. Web 2.0 here served its function of a social network that trespasses over geographical, linguistic and cultural boundaries. She resorted to social media to source the social capital she was lacking. The strategy proved successful. Giovanni responded and offered to be her guide in Milan’s nightlife. That night, Alexandra fell in love with Milan, and with Giovanni.

Giovanni was still living with his parents in the suburbs. In fact, he was not part of the glamorous scenes of the city. In our last interview, in late 2022, Alexandra described him as ‘bamboccione’, an Italian term that designates men who still behave as boys. But back then, Giovanni represented both the promise of love and the chance to relocate to Milan. This does not mean that Alexandra was adopting instrumental conduct, but rather that she was alert to opportunities. In The Grammar of the Multitude, Virno (2004) notices how opportunism is a salient emotional tonality of the contemporary subject, for it is required in order to navigate the precarity of a biography open to risk and confronted with change:

Opportunists are those who confront a flow of ever interchangeable possibilities, making themselves available to the greater number of these, yielding to the nearest one, and then quickly swerving from one to another (Virno, 2004: 87)

Opportunism is an affective and psychic device which serves to build a structure in the absence or refusal of institutional, familial or political ones. It is key to spot possibilities and envision generative connections between them. In 1 year, Alexandra managed to find her way through the infamously complicated Italian bureaucracy and arranged a visiting fellowship at the University of Milan. She moved to Giovanni’s parents’ flat in the suburbs. She established a structure that could hold together her romantic, professional and academic life, following her dream of living in the city of fashion while obeying the injunction of her family to study marketing.

The relationship with Giovanni is a project which acquires meaning in relation to other projects – relocating to Italy, getting closer to a creative career – and the idea of a ‘good life’ attached to achieving them all at the same time. While he may have been a ‘bamboccione’, he still provided leverage for changing her life, shifting it in a direction that more closely resonated with her objectives, and that enabled her to gain independence from her family. To make this configuration work, Alexandra needed to be ready to seize opportunities and work so that these would become concrete. This work involved deploying discursive, material and technological affordances: using Facebook to find a company in Milan, using her PhD to ground her presence in the city and her sexual and romantic capital to establish a relationship with a man that could provide with some social capital and a sense of belonging to Milan. However, Alexandra never depended on him financially. In fact, for the first few months, the rent was on her while he was in between jobs.

It is important to notice that in Alexandra’s narrative, love and career do not present themselves as opposites, as the two alternatives a woman has to choose from, but rather as part of a synergy whereby one enables the other. Investing in the relationship with Giovanni, Alexandra was also investing in a future career, getting closer to a realm of (real or imagined) possibilities. Love is a broader category that encompasses both work and heterosexual relationships, unifying them into the narrative of romance.

What is required to navigate gender and work in post-feminist creative industries is in fact an assemblage that includes both the emotional tonality of opportunism and a romantic sensitivity. The two are part of the ‘romantic opportunism’, a dispositif that connects different dimensions of life through instrumental links while diluting what may be seen as a utilitarian (thus hierarchical) ethos through the romantic plot. By relating to each dimension of one’s life with the codes of love, hierarchies are smoothed, and strategic decisions are signified as the unfolding of (a kind of) destiny. Romantic opportunism works as both a pragmatic and heuristic category, orientates actions and offers an interpretative lens to interpret them.

Being them all

After being awarded a PhD in media and communication, Alexandra began applying for jobs. For months, she looked for vacancies in communication and advertising but applied also for positions in call centres and retail stores. Most of the independent designers I interviewed recalled a similar story. Italy’s youth unemployment rate in 2014 reached a peak of over 40%, and in that situation, determined also by the European Union (EU) politics of austerity in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, self-employment in the form of zero-capital one-person enterprises was one of the few alternatives left to provide psychological relief from being unemployed (McRobbie et al., 2022: 98). Moreover, in the case of Alexandra, the stereotype surrounding Romanian migrants in Italy (Sacchetto and Vianello, 2015), especially women, could have constituted a further barrier to access the job market.

Frustrated, she started sewing again. For years, she had put it to one side and followed the path indicated by her parents. Yet, she never forgot it, and now that getting a ‘real job’ proved hard, she made a few clothes and posted her products on Etsy, a platform launched in 2005 with the aim of connecting independent craft producers with buyers around the world. In her narrative, this initial phase happened without planning, following the flow; yet a flow that was stirred by her decisions. It is destiny composed by opportunities that emerge out of digital affordances.

In the summer of 2012, I had made a few pieces of clothes . . . I tried to sell them on Etsy . . . I took a few good pictures and uploaded them . . . It was more of a ‘game’, you know like ‘let’s see what happens’ kind of thing . . . Surprisingly I did sell a few pieces. So I started thinking maybe I could actually do it? …. But my parents still thought it was a kind of joke. I had to demonstrate to them they were wrong.

It is the unexpected response gained by her products that prompted Alexandra to take sewing more seriously. This was made possible by the technosocial affordances offered by Etsy, which allowed her to open a digital shop with minimal initial investment. To publish an item for 4 months costs 20 cents, and for each sale, the platform takes 6.5% of the price displayed, plus postage. As it has been noticed, Etsy has blurred the gendered and racialised barriers between professionals and amateurs, for it has provided a cultural dispositif for the resignification of women’s home-based activities. Traditionally relegated to the private sphere of domestic life, sewing, knitting and crocheting have re-emerged as desirable skills, their artefacts bearing the ‘analogue aura’ so sought after in the digital era (Luckman, 2013).

The cultural resignification of craft is partially responsible for the reduction of the stigma traditionally associated with sewing. Angela McRobbie (2007), in her seminal book on independent fashion designers, pinpoints how sewing is systematically excluded from media accounts. The fashion industry, McRobbie argues, has been disentangled from the idea of gendered craft by means of an association with the artistic genius of male designers. In this context, women feature mostly as models, and the figure of the seamstress is made invisible. The experience of Alexandra indicates that this has partially changed. Yet, the seamstress is integrated only on the premise that she will embark on an enterprising journey. The working-class woman, as well as the unemployed woman, function as points of departure for an entrepreneurialising process of subjectivation (Littler, 2018).

Every time I met Alexandra, she was well dressed, her hair looking like she just had a blow dry; makeup carefully done. Her appearance resembled more a supermodel than a seamstress after 12 hours of manual labour. Yet, she did work at least 12 hours per day, sometimes even more, with her living room turned into a micro-sweatshop (she uses the word ‘studio’) by means of an IKEA foldable table; there is no space for a ‘proper’ table, she explained. Alexandra was both a hard-working seamstress and a glamorous model: She sewed her collection, and she modelled to promote it. She was also a businesswoman, who took care of cashflows and business plans. At home, she cooked every meal, trying out new Italian recipes every weekend. As her Facebook page testifies, she particularly loves Sicilian cuisine; she even tried to do cassata siciliana, a very difficult preparation indeed. Alexandra embodied the traits of a seamstress, a model, an entrepreneur, a housewife. The enjoyment lies in getting away with not choosing what kind of femininity one wants to identify with.

It is easy to spot the effects of neoliberal governmentality and female individualisation in this attempt to be everything and do everything. All the same, the history of women’s oppression shows that any embodiment of womanhood can be the potential target for discrimination and marginalisation. The body of women is always never enough and too much at the same time (Bordo, 2013). The body of the seamstress is degraded and made invisible, while that of the supermodel is objectified and consumed. Businesswomen are cold and bossy, whereas housewives are too docile and submissive. Yet what emancipation looks like is not clear to anyone. Embracing all conducts that have been associated with femininity is a way to balance the side effects of each one. You cannot be too much of a housewife if you are also a businesswoman. In this respect, I argue, ‘having it all’ also corresponds to the attempt of being it all, not to being reduced to any. If there is no such thing as a Woman, then we can only be multiple women, all possible women.

A few months into the inception of her business, Alexandra was getting closer to the person she wanted to be. She was about to rent a space in the centre of Milan to set up her atelier. This was a mark of success; of glory even. It was the sign that she had almost conquered Milan. In a few years, she settled in the city, launched her brand, was in a stable relationship and was about to open the atelier. She was close to being the person she wanted to be. She just needed more money, she said, and a “signature”. Alexandra explained she needed Giovanni to marry her. She wanted him to commit, ‘words are not enough’, she told me, ‘I need a signature’.

I was very impressed by Alexandra’s determination, her capacity to know what she needed. I did not know whether I was in love with my partner at the time, or whether I wanted to marry. I did not know if I should have stayed in the UK, or rather go back to my home country. Alexandra’s life project is the result of her active will to shape events and coordinate different dimensions. She needed a plan and the readiness to continuously refine and revise it. For this plan to work, she needed love, geography, bureaucracy and business to converge. There was no sense that the emphasis on the legal part of marriage could undermine the romantic aspect. The two were indistinguishable for they were part of the set of things she needed to structure her life.

Alexandra orchestrates her different roles so that they are (ideally) instrumental to one another while equally important and cherished. Being attractive feeds into her brand as a designer, cooking skills could contribute to conveying a very popular sense of authenticity on social media, being married provides emotional and material security and social capital in the city of fashion and so on; all is done with love and for love, so none can be seen as ancillary to the other. In this labour of composition, we can see romantic opportunism at work, as what is required to build one’s structure. However, the structure so skillfully built is always vulnerable to the durability and capacity of each of its elements and the strengths of their juncture. The subject must also be ready to face its de-composition and be able to re-compose.

Life as re-composition

Last time I saw Alexandra in person was in 2018. She had just broken up with Giovanni and closed the atelier. She was broke and distressed. Relocating to Palermo, her plan was to become a vlogger: She would have vlogged about her new life as a fashion designer there. We spent a couple of days together at a Summer School, like the first time we met. Alexandra would smoke her cigarettes insistently, talking about her future life, mentioning an influential entrepreneur in the field of hospitality she will work with. She was re-composing a structure by joining a few elements: a new platformised job, a new city, a new man based in that city. It was all she had: a few potential elements, a loose idea of a potential structure and two big suitcases, one with her clothes and the other with media equipment. She had sold all her sewing tools and purchased a camera, a tripod and a light ring. After the Summer School ended, Alexandra found herself with no money and went to sleep in a youth hostel.

One night, she was smoking a cigarette on the hostel balcony, and a man asked her for a lighter. He had an American accent; his name was Ethan. It was love at first sight, she recounts in her Facebook posts. A new picture emerged, rooted upon one foundational element: love, this time not for a job, but for a person. A new plan emerged too: They would live together in Palermo for a while, then they would move to Romania to get married (it was the easiest way to get married soon); meanwhile, they would apply for a US visa for Alexandra, and eventually they will relocate to Los Angeles, where Ethan is from. A new encounter, somehow triggered by a cigarette (those cigarettes . . . which Giovanni hated so much!), represented an opportunity to craft new potential joints between the romantic, professional and geographical elements of her life. A new life path began to be crafted on the debris of the previous one, the one she quit.

During our last interview, which took place on Zoom in November 2022, Alexandra was in the early phases of motherhood. She talked to me from the bed, while her husband was taking care of the baby. Alexandra stressed how this shows he is a good father and a good team worker in the couple, unlike Giovanni.

I asked why she had shut down her atelier 4 years before.

At the end of 2017, I did my math and realised that the business model of having the atelier was neither sustainable nor scalable, and so I decided to close the atelier and move back to work at home [. . .] I was in burnout because I worked really hard; there were days when I arrived at the atelier at 7 in the morning and left at 10 in the evening, even 11, midnight. For weeks, I worked seven days a week.

Alexandra’s story replicates the patterns of many microenterprises (see, e.g. Bandinelli, 2020; McRobbie, 2016; McRobbie et al., 2022). While selling some products online may be relatively easy in that it does not require a consistent initial investment, it is a model which is difficult to scale up. Moreover, the renting prices in the city centre and the heavy Italian taxation did not help. Alexandra ended up working the long hours in a self-exploitative manner because it was the only way she could avoid going bankrupt.

While Milan provided the stage for the projection of her dream, the reality of it was quite harsh. Alexandra could not benefit from any contact in the fashion scene. She had not studied in one of the city’s fancy schools (like IED or Marangoni), and she was a migrant. Besides, she lived in the suburbs and did not own a car; hence, it was very difficult for her to participate in Milan’s event economy, which typically involves night parties in central venues. She had no social capital to leverage and no family welfare to rely upon. She lacked the main resources that support independent fashion designers in the Italian context (McRobbie et al., 2022). Being based in Milan allowed Alexandra to promote herself by accessing a certain chain of signifiers related to the city, and to build an image of a desired future self as an established fashion designer, with an atelier close to Piazza Duomo. She reached that point, but that was the peak point instead of the point of taking off.

When I asked her why she thinks the business failed, she replied that she was not confident enough, adding ‘this is a juicy detail for your research’: a remark that exemplifies her role as an ally in the production of knowledge, as well as her familiarity with academic debates on the subject matter.

I blamed myself for the failure, for not being good enough, not necessarily in creating beautiful clothes, the clothes were beautiful, but in my entrepreneurship skills, money skills, money management ….

This discourse bears the traits of post-feminist logic in that it puts the blame on the individual instead of acknowledging systemic issues. When I told Alexandra that yes, she might have been more confident, but that it is very difficult to run an enterprise alone, with no capital and no infrastructure, she insisted that had she had a different attitude, she could have made it:

I felt that I could not ask for the prices for the dresses that would have allowed them to have long-term sustainability . . . To make things work I should have asked for 50% more But I had this imposter syndrome thing . . . which many female entrepreneurs have and that was mainly because I hadn’t formally studied fashion, I was self-taught . . . So I preferred to overload myself with orders rather than raise the prices . . . It was a confidence issue.

We can see a gendered guilt surfacing in between the lines. Women need to be more confident: This is the all-encompassing prescription offered by post-feminism (Orgad and Gill, 2021). Alexandra recognises that not having had a formal education in one prestigious fashion institution affected her attitude, but this is not interpreted in terms of unequal access to opportunities. Rather it is reduced to a shortcoming of the self who could not make up for what was not accessible to them.

Now Alexandra has taken up sewing again after a long break. ‘When I was in Palermo and then Bucharest’, she says ‘I could not sew, I was traumatised’. She dusted the sewing machine a few months ago, while she was already in the US. She used it to do ‘simple clothes’ just for herself. Then she re-opened the shop on Etsy and received a few orders. While she was pregnant, she made a few dresses, but it was draining. She says she will never open an atelier again; fashion is a side gig now.

Her main occupation is what she refers to as a ‘day job’. She is a marketing specialist for a company based in Los Angeles. She works remotely. Ethan’s mother and grandmother help her with childcare. Alexandra is the main breadwinner, while Ethan is doing a PhD with a scholarship, so she needs to ensure financial stability for the family: ‘We have a son, the rent, the car installment, I cannot afford to have the life of an entrepreneur who takes everything from scratch . . . I have become an adult now’.

During the interview, Alexandra used the phrase ‘day job’ multiple times. The ‘day job’ is what one must do to earn a salary, which provides stability and pays the bills. Passionate work is still present but as a ‘side gig’, back to the status of a hobby where it originated. Being an entrepreneur and doing what you love is thus described almost as a youthful transgression, something a little reckless, perhaps even extreme. Adulthood brings responsibility; thus, certain activities, no matter how thrilling, must be put on one side. In other words, creative work is part of a coming-of-age process, which has to do with learning about one’s self and the world, making mistakes and falling into ephemeral glories, taking risks and dealing with the consequences, but when adulthood kicks in, it must be given up. Alexandra is not regretful or resentful: ‘it is a process’, she says. Furthermore, she likes her day job, although ‘in a different way’. She added that she does not mind being the breadwinner in the family. Yet, I could not help but notice that both production and reproduction were falling heavily on her shoulders and those of two other women, her mother and grandmother in law. Ethan is the one pursuing his dream of getting a tenure, while Alexandra is working from home full-time: ‘sometimes they want me to be in two calls at the same time!’. In this setting, we can read the persistence of heteropatriarchal policies, coupled with the difficulties of making ends meet in capitalist societies. At the same time, we can notice how Ethan and his family provided Alexandra with the opportunity to start a new life and become a mother. As a woman doing research on other women, I feel unease at trapping the complexity of a life into abstract categories. It is difficult, when confronted with the experience of an embodied individual, to confidently separate emancipation from alienation. I believe it is more interesting to look at the ambivalences, the problematic junctures between opportunism and exploitation, self-realisation and failure.

All the same, as a matter of fact, the current structure of Alexandra’s life does not include creative work. She is accepting of it, and while she does miss the thrill of the process, she certainly does not crave the physical and mental exhaustion. This situation is integrated into a narrative arc that replicates that of modern romance, a parable in which stability and compromise follows a period of excitement and enthusiasm like a plateau follows a peak. A day job is like marital love: stable, but based on compromises. The creative job is a lover, passionate yet unsustainable, ultimately painful.

Alexandra hopes that one day, she will be in the condition to put making clothes at the centre again; possibly once Ethan gets his tenure track and releases her from the financial responsibility of the household. But maybe, even if Ethan could earn enough money to support the family, Alexandra would not go back to the structure she was living in before. She explains it in a recent post on Facebook, where she celebrates her time as a fashion designer while highlighting how she learned not to give up on her wellbeing to follow her ‘dreams’. This post is not regretful, rather celebratory and wise. In a sense, she seems to have identified the cruel optimism of the work romance, the fact that believing in it (too much) ultimately led her to suffer both physically, because of the sheer exhaustion, and emotionally, bearing the burden of the failure, negotiating with the sense of not having been ‘confident’ enough, as she puts it. All the same, within the current structure of Alexandra’s life, creativity and entrepreneurship appear to be positioned on the side, resignified as hobbies and thought of as pertaining to youth as opposed to adulthood. Adulthood is reflected in the stable salary of a ‘day job’ and the work of motherhood.

Conclusion: romantic opportunism and freelance femininity

This article has offered a literary thick description of the personal and professional trajectory of a woman and creative entrepreneur over the course of 12 years, across four cities and two marriages. By dwelling on the complexity of an individual’s experiences, I wanted to show how life histories and narrative ethnographies can enrich CCI research with empirical accounts of how they ‘become their own micro-structure’ (McRobbie, 2002: 518). In particular, I have shown how, to do the work of the structure, one needs to connect different dimensions of their life into a coherent and sustainable configuration. The story of Alexandra is indeed the story of a woman who forges connections between the personal and the professional to produce unique compositions. In this respect, it a story of individualisation but can also be read as an account of a ‘voyage of the self’ (McRobbie, 2016: 15): the process by which women strive to achieve happiness and fulfilment both at a professional and personal level.

Following a narrative arc that moves from her relocation to Milan and the marriage with her first husband, through the rise and fall of her microenterprise, to her new life in the US, I have paid attention to the difficulties that women may have in embracing existing models of womanhood without feeling subjected to the stigma associated with all of them, a difficulty that may be negotiated by striving to enact different versions of what a woman could be in order to be reduced to none. From this viewpoint, I argue, what is described as ‘have it all’ translates into ‘being them all’, the attempt to be all-possible women to escape the weight associated with each of them. ‘Having it all’ is not only a marker of success but also a way to escape being boxed into one of the (too) many stereotypes associated with femininity.

Reflecting on Alexandra’s lifeworld, I have identified two main emotional and cognitive dispositifs, that are opportunism and love, which, I argue, far from being perceived as pertaining to different orders of worth, are two parts of an assemblage which I have captured with the concept of romantic opportunism. Romantic opportunism is an attitude that is necessary to build material and narrative connections between different elements to turn them into a structure. Opportunism permits one to spot possibilities and envision potential links between seemingly dispersed projects, while love unifies them into the ‘romantic plot’. Crucially, love re-signifies opportunities into ‘coincidence’ and smooths out the subject’s agency (responsibility and toll) into a poetic notion of destiny.

Romantic opportunism is both a heuristic and pragmatic technology. It works as an interpretative category to make sense of the past and as an ethical principle to guide one’s conduct. In other words, it is a biographical dispositif: It functions to build and narrate a life. The implicit goal, the status that it is supposed to realise, is the post-feminist ideal of ‘having it all’. It typifies a version of freelance femininity whereby the subject is attached to different parallel identities without identifying with any of them specifically but rather with the ways in which they are made to co-exist, that is, with the self-crafted junctures that keep the structure in place. Freelance feminism can seek to escape the dimension of political critique through a kind of detachment whereby the depth of each dimension of contemporary womanhood is curtailed by its entanglement with many others. In so doing, while it saves itself from the reductionism of traditional roles, it does not point at a radical redefinition of them. It is a horizontal form of identity in which nothing is essential in and of itself, but it is the overall configuration that is deemed substantial, for it is that through which the subject’s agency is solely expressed.