Fashioning Professionals

From artist to curator, couturier to fashion blogger, 'creative' professional identities can be viewed as social practices, enacted, performed and negotiated through the media, the public, and industry. Fashioning Professionals addresses what it means to be a creative professional, historically and in the digital age, as new ways of working and doing business have given rise to new professional identities. Bringing together critical reflections from international researchers, the book spans fashion, design, art, architecture, and advertising. It examines both traditional and emergent roles in creative industries, from advertising executives and surrealist artists to mannequin designers, pop stylists, bloggers, makers and design curators. The book reveals how professional identities are continually in a state of fashioning, through style, taste, gender and cultural representation, highlighting moments of friction and flux in the creative labour of the global economy. Interweaving critical perspectives from fashion and design history with sociology and cultural theory, Fashioning Professionals addresses a burgeoning area of research as we enter new terrain in fashion and the creative industries.

Felice McDowell is Associate Lecturer in Cultural and Historical Studies at the London College of Fashion, and Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, UK. Leah Armstrong is Senior Lecturer in Design History at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, Austria.

List of Illustrations List of Contributors Foreword Acknowledgements Introduction: Fashioning Professionals: History, Theory and Method Leah Armstrong and Felice McDowell I. Inventing 1. Media in the Museum: Fashioning the Design Curator at the Boilerhouse Gallery, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Liz Farrelly 2. Fashioning Pop: Stylists, Fashion Work and Popular Music Imagery, Rachel Lifter 3. The Labor of Fashion Blogging, Agnès Rocamora II. Negotiating 4. Fashioning Professional Identity in the British Advertising Industry: The Women's Advertising Club of London, 1923-1939: 95-114, Philippa Haughton 5. Satirical Representations of the Bauhaus Architect in Simplicissimus Magazine: 115-133, Isabel Rousset 6. The Self as an Art-Work: Performative Self-Representation in the Life and Work of Leonor Fini: 134-155, Andrea Kollnitz III. Making 7. Designer Unknown: Documenting the Mannequin Maker, June Rowe 8. Fashioning the Contemporary Artist: The Spatial Biography of Sue Tompkins, Caroline Stevenson 9. The Maker 2.0: A Craft-Based Approach to Understanding a New Creative Identity, Catharine Rossi Index