British Fashion Design

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.
"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."
-- Mark Jacobs, "American Journal of Sociology