ORIGINE, AUTENTICITÀ E VALORE: LA PRODUZIONE DEL CONSUMO ENTUSIASTICO DI MODA.

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1 Convegno Internazionale GEOGRAFIE DEL VESTIRE Milano, 4 e 5 Maggio 2006 Aula S. Pio XI Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore L.go Gemelli, 1 LE CULTURE DELLA MODA GIOVEDÌ 4 MAGGIO ORIGINE, AUTENTICITÀ E VALORE: LA PRODUZIONE DEL CONSUMO ENTUSIASTICO DI MODA. Louise Crewe, School of Geography, University of Nottingham Abstract Il contributo analizza un cambiamento relativamente recente nel campo del capitalismo: quelle che un tempo erano viste come alleanze di ripiego e improvvisazioni ispirate stanno progressivamente diventando nuovi modelli di relazione tra produttori e consumatori, che hanno il potere di ridefinire le innovazioni e i mercati. Mi riferisco alla produzione di consumo elettronico entusiastico, una nuova fusione tra le imprese, i consumatori e il processo creativo di produzione di ciò che può essere descritto come un impasto culturale ibrido. I consumatori prendono sempre più spunto da altri consumatori più che dai canali convenzionali come le grandi corporazioni o le pubblicazioni a stampa, catalizzati in parte attraverso i mezzi di comunicazione e di consumo elettronici, i sofisticati siti internet, gli sms e le reti sociali elettroniche. Anche i produttori stanno cercando nuovi meccanismi per imbrigliare le conoscenze dei consumatori attraverso una vasta schiera di modalità di collocazione del marchio e di strategie estensive di pubblicità ambientale, consenso alla registrazione dei dati su siti internet e campagne di marketing basate sul passaparola. Di qui l intenzione di esplorare i contorni di questo fenomeno correlato nello specifico all industria di moda. Basandomi su alcuni studi di caso, tra cui il sito Oki-ni.com e Levi-Strauss, voglio mettere in discussione che cosa tale cambiamento comporti in termini della più generale concettualizzazione dell origine, del valore e dell autenticità della pratica di consumo. Note biografiche Louise Crewe è Professore di Geografia Umana all Università di Nottingham. Lavora sui temi della vendita al dettaglio, del consumo, della mercificazione e della sistemazione, e i suoi interessi di ricerca si rivolgono in particolare all industria di moda. I progetti di ricerca recentemente finanziati riguardano: Putting e-commerce in its place: constructing electronic times and spaces (ESRC, con Nigel Thrift, Andrew Leyshon, Shaun French e Pete Webb), e Disposal and consumerism: on how and why things come not to matter (ESRC, con Nicky Gregson). È coautrice con Nicky Gregson di Second Hand Worlds (Berg, 2003), e ha pubblicato diversi articoli, tra cui: Accounting for e- commerce: abstractions, virtualism and the cultural circuit of capital Economy & Society (2005), e tre rapporti annuali Progress in Human Geography sulla vendita al dettaglio e il consumo.

2 ABITI CHE MANGIANO LE PERSONE Daniel Miller, Department of Anthropology, University College London Abstract Il contributo analizza la crescita di ansia associata alla scelta degli abiti, a partire dalle donne che indossano il sari in India, dove vi sono chiare convenzioni che permettono all individuo di tenere sotto controllo la realtà circostante attraverso il proprio abbigliamento. A Trinidad, al contrario, vi è una maggior apertura nei confronti degli stili individuali, ma il loro successo dipende più dalla valutazione pubblica. A Londra vi sono ancor meno convenzioni e giudizio pubblico. Questo comporta il timore che un individuo, possedendo più di un capo di abbigliamento, rischi di perdere la propria personalità, che può essere fagocitata dall ansia di scegliere gli abiti. L ultimo caso volge lo sguardo a una forma di abbigliamento globale, il denim, che rappresenta una risposta a tale ansia, ma dipende dalla riconciliazione del senso di identità globale con l identità altamente individualizzata. Note biografiche Daniel Miller è Professore di Cultura Materiale presso il Dipartimento di Antropologia dell University College London. I suoi interessi di ricerca riguardano la cultura materiale, il consumo di massa, l economia politica, l utilizzo delle nuove tecnologie (internet e cellulare). È autore e editore di numerose pubblicazioni, tra cui le più recenti Materiality (Duke University Press 2005), Clothing as Material Culture (con S. Küchler. Oxford: Berg 2005) e The Sari (con M. Banerjee. Oxford: Berg 2003).

3 GIOVANI, GENERE E ABBIGLIAMENTO USATO IN ZAMBIA: STILI LOCALI E GLOBALI Karen Tranberg Hansen, Department of Anthropology, Northwestern University Abstract L abbigliamento di seconda mano importato dall occidente è diventato un bene popolare tra le classi delle aree urbane e rurali in Zambia. I consumatori affollano i mercatini dell usato, lodando non solo la convenienza ma anche la scelta resa possibile dalla pronta disponibilità dei vestiti. L attrazione per gli abiti usati ha a che fare soprattutto con l imitazione della moda occidentale; riguarda i valori individuali e di gruppo riferiti alle pratiche di abbigliamento, che si ispirano, ma non sempre si allineano, alle norme locali sulle etichette sociali e il decoro sessuale. Oltre a soddisfare bisogni essenziali, l abbigliamento nuovo e usato costituisce un luogo in cui le identità sociali vengono costruite e contestate. Perciò l abito e l abbigliarsi sono sia un fine in sé che un mezzo attraverso il quale si può esprimere un certo potenziale liberatorio, ma che può causare anche ansia, dal momento che gli abiti non sono indossati passivamente, ma richiedono la collaborazione attiva degli individui. Il sistema emergente della moda è in continuo sviluppo, e il suo significato dipende dai contesti specifici in cui è creato. Basandosi su una ricerca di tipo antropologico condotta in Zambia negli anni 90 e su recenti lavori sulle pratiche vestimentiarie dei giovani a Lusaka, questo contributo mostra come i giovani consumatori utilizzino l abbigliamento usato occidentale per costruire nuove mode e nuovi stili. Se da un lato tali trasformazioni sono influenzate dalle culture globali della moda giovanile, dall altro esse si collocano all interno dell universo locale dell abbigliamento, che è a sua volta legato alle percezioni del corpo e della sessualità, distinte per i generi e le generazioni, e alimentate dai quotidiani imperativi economici e dal potere relativo dello stato. Le norme che regolano tale universo hanno un peso maggiore per le donne che per gli uomini: tranne che per quelle molto benestanti, le scelte di abbigliamento delle giovani donne sono assai ristrette. Il contributo analizza quindi due diversi contesti esemplificativi, le scelte di abbigliamento dei giovani uomini e quelle delle giovani donne. Note biografiche Karen Tranberg Hansen è Professore di Antropologia alla Northwestern University. Le sue ricerche si concentrano sulle dimensioni, materiali, culturali e sociali della vita urbana. Ha pubblicato diversi lavori sulle condizioni domestiche e di genere, la sessualità, l economia domestica e lavorativa informale, e le dinamiche culturali del commercio di abbigliamento usato. Tra i titoli principali: Distant Companions: Servants and Employers in Zambia (Cornell 1989), Keeping House in Lusaka (Columbia 1997), ha curato l edizione di African Encounters with Domesticity (Rutgers 1992) e con Mariken Vaa, Reconsidering Informality: Perspectives from Urban Africa (Nordic Africa Institute (2004). Il suo libro più recente Salaula: The World of Secondhand Clothing and Zambia (Chicago, 2000) ha ricevuto il premio Anthony Leeds per l antropologia urbana nel 2001 e il premio della Society of Economic Anthropology nel Nell anno accademico 2005/2006 ha ottenuto una borsa di studio al Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington D.C., dove sta terminando un libro sui giovani a Lusaka.

4 Convegno Internazionale GEOGRAFIE DEL VESTIRE Milano, 4 e 5 Maggio 2006 Aula S. Pio XI Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore L.go Gemelli, 1 AUTHORSHIP, AUTHENTICITY & VALUE: PRODUCING ENTHUSIASTIC FASHION CONSUMPTION Louise Crewe, School of Geography, University of Nottingham Do not quote without the author s permission. Draft of paper presented at international conference on Geographies of Clothing, organized by the Centro per lo studio della moda e della produzione culturale, Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy, May 4-5, Introduction I m through with what fashion has become. For the first time in my life I ve cut the ****ing cord If I see that you bothered to spend 500 that you didn t have on this season s Balenciaga handbag, I feel sorry for you (Peter Saville, Confessions of an Art Director, Artwork Audley 2006) This paper questions how fashion value can be produced, consumed and sustained under conditions of market saturation, consumer disillusionment and a longterm profit squeeze (Brenner 2003a, 2003b). I argue that value is increasingly being constructed relationally through recursive feedback links between producers and consumers, opening up new possibilities for coproduction in fashion markets. The idea of the consumer being involved in product creation is, of course, nothing new, as Levi s customized jeans project in the early 1990s shows. The brand is increasingly the product that is consumed, the commodity itself being simply an appendix; a postscript to embody whatever story isbeing s/told (SalzerMorling and Strannegard 2004). Significantly too, the conventional distinctions between brand producer and consumer are becoming blurred, and brand theorists longheld models of sender, message and receiver are breaking down in terms of both practical and theoretical resonance. Symbolic management is increasingly a core organisational competence across a whole range of sectors and consumers are rarely now the grateful receivers of predefined corporate messages, if indeed they ever were. What is interesting now, however, is the scale and pace at which models of coproduction are evolving, and the fashion sector is arguably leading the way in steering and shaping this trend. This in turn begins to challenge conventional understandings of a number of key concepts, including branding, design, authorship, originality and authenticity. What were once seen as makeshift 1

5 alliances between organisations, or inspired improvisations amongst consumers, are gradually settling in to a new pattern of producer-consumer relations that have the power to redefine what is understood as fashion design, innovation and markets. This reworking is the result of a series of different processes that have evolved and coalesced to the point where they can be effective in producing a new phenomenon. This I call the production of electronicallyenabled enthusiastic consumption, a new blurring between firms, consumers and the creative process to produce what might be described as a hybrid mash culture (Wilkinson 2005). Consumers are increasingly taking cues from one another rather than from conventional channels such as large corporations or printed media outlets, catalysed in part via electronic means of communication such as peer-to-peer networks, sophisticated comparison internet sites, mobile messaging and electronic social networks. Fashion producers too are increasingly and desperately seeking out new mechanisms to harness the knowledges of consumers and to refresh their enthusiasm to consume. The result is an accelerating connective mutation (Thrift, 2005) of cycles of production, consumption and reproduction as consumers break into formerly closed systems and processes, and as producers seek means through which to harness such exterior knowledges and draw them back into the corporate realm. Together such processes have the potential to transform how commodity encounters are shaped and practised by the consumer. This is especially significant under conditions where the production of commodities and commodification is identified as the beating heart of capitalism (Thrift, 2005: 5). Consumption is increasingly a creative component in the production of capitalism. In order to explore the means through which fashion value is produced and sustained, I focus on five key contemporary developments. Beginning with a set of arguments about grotesque globalization and the notoriety surrounding an industry shored up by multibillion pound empires built on uninspired architectural formats, dirty work practises, exploitation and global inequality, the paper reflects on the very real limits to the global fashion model as currently constituted 1. That said, in the remainder of the piece I move on to an exploration of how fashion is responding to this apparent social, economic and cultural crisis, drawing on five key processes. The first is the ways in fashion spaces and architectures are increasingly designed in order to generate positive affective responses in consumers. Drawing on notions of the experience economy (Pine and Gilmour 1999), theatre, specularity and performance, fashion spaces are increasingly designed with affective consumption in mind. The second process aims to push value through new forms of temporality and ephemerality, playing with ideas of pace and (in)visibility. The third development is the key role played by enthusiasm, passion and the hunger for knowledge in shaping new forms of value. Fourthly, and very much connected to the above, is the way in which new technologies are both shaping and enabling new forms of cooperative creation through constant interactivity and the development of connected consumer collectivities. Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, the last section suggests that the key to unlocking the secret of value may lie less in the realm of commodity 1 Although we acknowledge the long history and popularity that certain global brands continue to enjoy. The passion and power afforded by fan-consumers is captured by the recent Happy Victims photography exhibition Happy Victims in London by Tsuzuki who photographs some thirty Japanese individuals who have turned the act of shopping into an indefinable obsession, lying somewhere between artistic expression and an unusual kind of fetishism. Worshipping one individual designer, these men and women consume religiously their chosen labels Jean Paul Gaultier, Anna Sui, Vivienne Westwood often at the expense of life s other necessities. They turn what are typically minute apartments into living temples to their fashion gods, resulting in interiors which range from the breathtakingly cluttered to the manically ordered. The 'Happy Victims' sit in minute rooms, lovingly surrounded by pristine garments from the designer of their choice. The focus is not on the individual, who is often blurred, but on the clothing that it is felt defines them. A Buddhist monk is shown in his Tokyo retreat surrounded by his Commes des Garcon collection. Once a month he leaves his temple to visit Tokyo for shopping and fun. In the temple he may wear a robe, but in Tokyo he wears nothing but Garcon. He sees the designs as having a religious quality. The fetishistic worship of designers is echoed again by a photograph of a young Japanese man who describes himself as being so devoted to Hermes that he carries his 500,000 yen Hermes briefcase in a (Hermes) towel to protect it from his own sweat.. Somewhat ironically, a number of the feted designers have not returned the devotees admiration and have tried to have their brand removed from the exhibition, fearing that it would create a negative image for the label. This is the only point at which the people become victims - victims of the fashion PR machine. 2

6 or retail design, nor in rapid fashion or knowledge innovation, but in the autotopographical potential of clothing. Combining questions of design, display, wearing, authorship, signature and patina, the value of clothing may lie in its social history and geography, in the traces of wear and use embedded within it. Our clothes have memories, stored, layered, deposited within them, and it is through the excavation of memory and use that value may emerge. I conclude by reflecting on the broader implications of these new modes of making fashion markets through collaborative producer-consumer practice. Is this merely a means of outsourcing innovation to consumers, the latest in a series of organizational efforts to extract surplus value? One might argue that all that is happening is that firms have found new models of drawing consumer knowledges into their orbit from which they are able to derive a profit at remarkably little cost. Further, they are also able to bolster their brands and reputations, which they police with the utmost vigour through copyright and other intellectual property rights. In other words, the much-hyped cocreation model of organisational innovation may, in reality, be more than the latest phase in the commodification of consumer desire, another corporate attempt to turn consumer passions into profit. But if corporations want to play on the street and use its signs, symbols and codes to lever cool, they need to be very clear about the rules. Gestural marketing politics simply won t do and there are some very real corporate dangers in ceding creative control to unpredictable consumers. Whilst superficially organisations may generate the kudos of creative buzz or noise that they so desperately desire, they may also find their brand message and integrity slipping dangerously offmessage (Rowan, 2006) 2. And whilst enthusiastic consumers might seem like ideal customers, fans can all too easily fall out of love with their objects of affection which can lead not just to indifference or apathy, but to outright hostility and antipathy. And so rather than being the latest corporate strategy to capture cool and freely tap into consumer enthusiasms and knowledges, cocreation may hold out the possibility at least for greater levels of consumer empowerment, new forms of agency and selfdetermination on the part of clever consumers. It is these broader sets of questions that are addressed in the final section of the paper. Space. Fashion architecture & the experience economy Making a shop is like making clothes: you need to excite and energize people. There has to be the same shock and sense of surprise (Rei Kawakubo, Comme des Garcons Red Shop) One of the earliest means through which organizations attempted to push brand value was through the creation of new and spectacular worlds into which commodities are inserted. Acknowledging that consumers have to be drawn into an affectivelyinclined environment (Thrift, 2004), and that shopping as practice needs to appear as an event rather than a routine, a number of retailers have attempted to tap into or harness affect through the creation of inspirational architectural forms and spectacular spaces of display and sale. Aiming to fuse retailing, entertainment, theatre and performance, stores such as NikeTown and Prada s global epicenter stores explicitly embed value in drama, display and experience. Prada is perhaps the archetypal exemplar of this process and began to rethink the traditional design format of its retail stores in the late 1990s as part of a broader strategy to protect its brand identity. Located in some of the world s key fashion districts (Aoyama 2 The Burberry football hooligan and chav story is a good illustration of how undesirable consumer groups can usurp and transform brand image in unanticipated and unwanted ways (Tomkins 2005). The openness of distribution channels in turn makes it far easier and speedier for adversarial or accusatory brand messages to circulate amongst disaffected and self determining community groups the : rant and rave at 3G is one example. See too the recent furore in London over Saatchi and Saatchi s viral campaign for Sagatiba, a new Brazilian drink which used a stencil based on the statue of Christ the Redeemer that overlooks Rio and incorporated graffiti into its wildposting. The campaign created a backlash on the streets of London and the stencils were systematically defaced by graffiti artists and angry consumer groups who were angered by advertising s attempt to appropriate an art form without investing in it. Inadvertently, organizations may find that their efforts to capture consumer cool backfire. Consumer collectivities may be passionate and enthusiastic. They can also be fractious, unruly and dissonant. 3

7 in Tokyo, SoHo in NY, Beverly Hills in LA and San Francisco), Prada worked with leading architect Rem Koolhaus who has a longstanding interest in shopping space in the contemporary city. Their aim was to create a small number of epicentre stores that would act as monuments to their brand whilst at the same timeretaining brand integrity and value. Koolhaus acknowledges the danger of repetition that results from indefinite expansion as each additional store reduces aura, contributes to a sense of familiarity and ultimately can threaten the viability of the brand as a creative enterprise (Koolhaas, 2xx). The danger of the larger scale, he argues, is the flagship syndrome: a megalomaniac accumulation of the obvious that eliminates the last elements of surprise and mystery that cling to the brand, imprisoning it in a definitive identity (Koolhaas). But expansion can also be used for a strategy of permanent redefinition of the brand. The epicentre store becomes a device that renews the brand by counteracting and destabilizing any received notion of what Prada is, does or will become. The epicentre store acts as a conceptual window, a means of capturing and transmitting future directions for the brand. Koolhaus imagines that the epicenter store will act as a communicative tool to constantly renew the brand. He defines five key concepts that can help to define the value of the brand: variety, exclusivity, changeability, service, and noncommerciality. The defining feature of the New York store is the wave, a curving floor that swoops from street level to basement. The store also incorporates a series of aluminium mesh cages suspended from the ceiling that are movable imitate the upside down skyline of a hanging city. The space has a chameleonlike quality by day it is used as an area for shoe display and sale, but it can equally transform itself into a performance space with retractable stage. The fitting rooms are entered through doors with privalite glass that transforms from transparent to opaque at the flick of a switch. Once inside the light is customer controlled and the rooms are fitted with IT features designed to excite. A series of cameras and plasma screens record customers trying on their garments, and they can then watch themselves again from all angles in instant replay. The images are then stored and available for use by the customer instore or online. Using RFID tags for both inventory and customer cards, Prada aim for a seamless shopping experience in store and on the web. Screens are used as a key device for looking and seeing throughout the stores and the aim is to overlay commercial functionality with a series of experiential typologies that expand the imaginative potential of shopping. The second, and perhaps more interesting an example is that of OkiNi in London, whose hybrid store/gallery space at Savile Row is conceptually instructive. The space appears to be everything a shop is not. It has a large and highly visible window, looks more like a gallery than a shop, and has none of the accoutrements associated with conventional retail outlets: rails of clothes, tills, carrier bags, mannequins, stacked shelves. The store design and look is achieved by having a fanshaped tray made of Russian oak into the space s concrete shell. Drawing on the concept of tailoring the oak lining or 'skin' creates a new floor that slopes towards the front rather like a stage. Its floor slopes gently upwards and its low walls leave space around the edges of the room concealing changing rooms. There is no furniture. Instead, there are long piles of industrially produced felt arranged in long multicoloured mats. The felt offers more than a functional, minimalist aesthetic; it is also a tactile presence, the decidedly undigital antidote to the virtual shop. Used in this way, the material is unavoidably evocative of the work of Joseph Beuys, the godfather of installation art (McGuirk, J 2002 March, Contemporary pp. 5659: p57). The space is deliberately tactile and product based and is a hybrid form between gallery and home, the domestic and an installationinprogress, social space and consumption place. The art and design books casually displayed endorse that this is a fashionmeetsart arena rather than the more usual fashionmusic nexus associated with most clothing stores. Clothes here are displayed on the felts or hung from metal coathangers hooked over the wooden lining, and are displayed in sharp relief alongside the soft oak lining and the raw white walls. The location of the flagship store on Savile Row is also significant. Gieves and Hawkes are located at 1 Savile Row and are still the largest bespoke tailor on what is historically the key site in the UK for tailoring. The acquisition of the flagship space at the very opposite (Soho) end of SR (number 25) was really the start of the myth and its unravelling. OkiNi 4

8 were seen to be the polar opposite of G&H, in terms of the concept and its representation. They were seen in a certain sense as the enemy and as deeply antitraditionalist and unconventional. Okini s early window banners not by royal appointment in many senses played up this perceived antagonism, but in an ironic way. Time: fast fashion and itinerant retailing Shopping is boring (Rem Koolhaus) A number of organizations have evolved strategies focusing on shifting temporalities in order to ignite consumer passion. By speeding up distribution chains and prioritizing rapid response design systems, groups such as TopShop, H&M and Zara have brought runwayinspired collections to the high street quickly and affordably. Part of the broader blurring of conventional market positioning, such brands have effectively managed the transition from cheap and tired to desirable and now 3. Perhaps the most successful chain has been the Spanish group Zara who can make a new line, from initial concept to arrival in the store in 3 weeks as compared to a conventional industry norm is 9 months. Zara undertakes 85% of in-house production after the season has started in an industry where 0-20% is the norm and produce some 11,000 distinct items (SKUs) per year where the industry average is 24,000. The design structure is organizationally flat and inhouse production predominates (40% of finished garments are made inhouse). Low prices, fast turnaround of high fashion product and prime pitch store locations draw in repeat customers 4. In addition, low margins, high volume sales and low marketing & advertising costs offer an effective fast fashion business model. Three quarters of merchandise is changed every 3-4 weeks and the value of scarcity is underscored by a policy of no repeat ordering and deliberate undersupply. Constant fluctuation is here no longer a contradiction in terms, but is a way of seeing and knowing. The second illustration of the significance of new temporalities in retail design and architecture is that of Vexed Generation who developed a concept store in London s Soho that played with ideas of form, function, durability and age. Instead of participating in spectacular but momentary performance of the biannual catwalk shows, Vexed invest instead in their concept store and use at as the architectural backcloth to questionino broader social and political issues. Using highly durable technotextiles that are almost impossible to wear out, they invert the conventional relation between clothing and space. Here, the clothes are more durable than the spaces in which they are displayed, where floor and wall coverings are allowed to fade, wear and rip. The first concept store opened in 1995 and reflected Vexed s concerns about escalating urban surveillance. (see powerpoint). Insert Pia Myrvold cybercouture. The final example of pushing value through rapid temporality is that of popup retailing, pioneered by Commes des Garcons stores that popup for two weeks in raw, rugged, disused spaces. (see powerpoint) Truly madly deeply: Raving fans, knowledge addicts and coproduction "For the very last word in customized branding, hit the web site okini.com NYLON Pervasive communications are transforming consumer practices and enabling continuous, at-adistance interactivity (Plant 2001, Rheingold 2002). Forrester Research, for example, estimate that 60% of online Europeans now connect with others in mutual interest or support groups. Electronic tribes structured around consumer interests are proliferatine (Kozinets), and accelerating levels of 3 Assisted by other fast fashion media messages such as the weekly fashion magazine Grazia, whose buy-line is From Primark to Prada. 4 It has been argued that the average Zara customer will wear an item ten times. 5

9 consumer connectedness via electronic means (text messaging, mobile cameravideophones, chat rooms, instant messaging services, , wearables and wireless connectivity more broadly) are combining to connect always-on consumers who may be always-on-the-move in new and potent ways. This ability to engage with others without co-presence is powerful. The collective absentpresence of coconsumers add up to powerful systems of member-generated value. The distinction between electronically-connected collectivities of consumers and the atomised, individual sovereign consumer is fundamentally important in theorising the fusion of the production and consumption of value. Whilst committed consumers, or fans, have long been part of mediatised society, it became clear during the 1990s that with the aid of the Internet, fan communities were taking on much more active roles. Increasingly, they came to be thought of as communities of practice. And indeed, by the early 2000s, the community of practice literature had become prevalent in business as well as in academia and was beginning to describe these communities as extended knowledge systems (Wenger, 1999, Wenger et al., 2002). One particularly good example of this is the emergence of the otaku market (Kitabayashi 2004, Yang 2005). A number of significant otaku activities (manga, anime, videogaming and pop-idol worship) are beginning to merge because of overlaps in membership and cross-pollination of content. Not only is the otaku market significant in cultural and economic terms 5, it is also driving technological innovation in the sector. Recent research by NRI sees otaku fans as an engine for creativity and invention who have pioneered revolutionary advances in consumer electronics. Their zeal for perfection and deep knowledge of technology makes them an important base for beta testing and new product development (Kitabayashi, 2004). This notion of projects being continually in development has been described as a more general feature of the contemporary economy by Neff and Stark as one of a world that is permanently beta (Neff and Stark, 2002). The idea of a permanently emergent and interactive economy; that is, one in which consumers sign up to experiences co-created with producers and flows of goods which have themselves been modulated by consumers which becomes the primary way in how economies are reproduced (Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004). Quite why these consumer groups commit considerable emotional investments to the objects, subjects and texts that they follow is the focus a much debate (Stacey, 1994). Certainly it would seem that fandom is at least in part a search for identity and a sense of self and social belonging under conditions of risk, fragmentation and uncertainty (Giddens, 1991; Lash 1993; Warde 1994). As certitude fragments, identità-creation through consumption becomes a risky business. One response, it has been argued, is the losing of the self into a collaborative subject (Maffesoli, 1988:145). Fan communities have been seen as tribal collectivities, affective assemblages or neotribes searching for shared sentiments, or at least approval of their assumed narrations of self (Bauman, 1992, Hetherington, 1998, Maffesoli 1996) 6. 6 The solidarity made possible by the Internet provides shared experience; validation is both sought and found. Labels, or groupings, become organizing factors in the lives of members, who seek support and affirmation by bonding with others of a similar kind. Consumer communities, enabled through new technologies, are gathering around enthusiasms and are more easily able to partecipate with others at-a-distance. The community validates our choices, our taste. But in addition to validating consumer tastes and desires, and managing individual projects of identity, collectivities of enthusiastic consumers are 5 Otaku hobbyists were estimated to have spent in excess of $2.6 billion in purchases to support their hobbies (Kitabayashi 2004). Such fans have, in addition, functionally shaped the most successful Japanese entertainment genres ever exported, Manga and anime, which the Japan External Trade Organization anticipate will grow into a $100 billion global market. In the US alone, anime and anime related sales exceeded 5.2 billion in Less celebratory interpretations of electronically-enabled enthusiasms are possible of course. The search for identity under conditions of social uncertainty and alienation can equally produce altogether darker and more dangerous affiliations. When fandom becomes fantasy, obsessional, manic or compulsive, dark and unanticipated shadow geographies are possible. The desire for desire, the ache for approval and the hungry hunt for experience can be powerful emotive forces shaping consumption. 6

10 significant for other reasons too. Firstly, such alliances enable the disintermediation (or at least reconfiguration) of trusted intermediaries and knowledge providers. Shifts in technology have enabled access to vast amounts of commodity knowledge and information that was hitherto out of reach 7. This always-on pervasiveness enables automatic connectivity and new levels of transparency where there is less scope for hype, spin and con. Consumers are relying less on the authority of conventional branding and advertising campaigns for their consumption knowledges and consumption is increasingly determined by opinions, reviews and recommendations. This delayering or disintermediation of trusted experts may significantly empower consumers. Secondly, user centered innovation systems where consumers are a vital force in research and experimentation are increasingly defining innovation. The ideas of CitizenBrand or CustomerMade refer to far more than simple customization or personalization: consumers are not simply choosing between models; rather, they are designing the models they choose, a form of open source branding where each individual customer is a brand designer who is given the ability to contribute to the brand's image. Thirdly, the vastness of available information can create chaos, confusion, contradiction, repetition. Insatiable demands for information coupled with raised expectations about the quality of that information can have troubling implications as consumers are finding their way deeper and faster into increasingly obscure and potentially unreliable sources of information. As new customerproducers are able to continuously add content in the formof text, audio, video and so on, a public-authoring streaming ethos emerges which can be disorienting and frustrating 8. Information retrieved from open distributed systems can be unreliable, uncertain and time consuming. Usergenerated, curated and edited blogs can be highly variable in their quality and reliability. There are some very clear limits to a model of the diffusion of innovation via a public authoring streaming ethos. Where does one find reliable information? Who does one trust? Clearly there is an increasing need for systems of curation and validation with respect to publicly authored information sources, but this in turn raises sets of questions about authorship, censorship, control, power and trust. Layering, storage & deposition: used clothing as repositories of memory and value Distinctions are created not just through buying more goods but by playing with an existing vocabulary of material signs through the development of rhetoric of use (Rendell, 2000: 11). Whilst it has long been recognised that things are forever engaged in the process of becoming (Koptyoff 19xx), clothes are in many ways a particularly acute exemplar of this, a unique category of good. For the very act of their wearing is in itself transformative. We wear clothes, clothes wear, they are and become worn. There is beauty in use and worn-in value, and wear can itself create value a baby s first sleep-suit, the lover s jumper, stains and rips as signs of enrichment not derision (Schutte 2xxx: 7). Fashion travels. Used clothes simultaneously hit a whole number of sensory registers touch, smell, sight. Revealing the richness of wear requires that we freeup our notions of authorship, authenticity and creation and think hard about who takes credit for a garment s presence and form in the world. For when a garment is purchased it begins to record its own individual story. Whilst the brand, label, signature or author may be the defining feature at the 7 Examples of the range and scope of electronically enabled information include international price comparison search engines, online recommendations, opinions, reviews and guides of just about every commodity or service imaginable. We might reflect here, for example, on how many consumers have not looked at flight, film, hotel, city, shop guides and review sites online? Who doesn t Google at least once a day? 8 Examples include myspace.com, weblogs, podcasts, and Flickr:, a photo-sharing site with over 70 million tagged pictures up-loaded from individuals around the world. Some 10 million pictures are added every month and tagged. One can, for example, look inside other people s handbags and wardrobes: flickr.com/photos/tags/whatsinyourbag. Flickr.com/photos/tags/closet/clusters/clothes-hangers-shirts. But ultimately do we care? And if we do, is this little more than electronic voyeurism? Who are to be the custodians of electronic knowledge-spaces? 7

11 outset and may have informed the initial purchase decision, cycles of use and wear transform the garment and its meaning. The initial brand function is interwoven and overwritten by new sets of meanings and processes of de- or re-valorisation. This layering of meaning and memory is in turn evidence of occurrence the cigarette burn from a drunken night out, the rip from the fall, the ink from the child s pen. Clothes tell stories. They are repositories of accumulated biographies, their stories caught between the warp and the weft, fused into the thread, layered, accumulated. Two particular examples are drawn on in order to explore further the ways in which second hand clothing acts as a memorybank, as a spatial representation of identity. Both, in rather different ways, emphasise the importance of clothing as social practice and highlight that fashion value is always mobile and contingent. Object value is always a process rather than a revelation or a moment. The first example is an ongoing project by Martin Mairinger looking at shifts in value and meaning as second hand clothes circulate amongst different owners. When the item of clothing - for instance, a jacket, pair of pants or Tshirt - is sold at a special secondhand shop, the buyer can access ownership information online and find out about the garment s past. The project explores the ways in which the secondhand interface node may yield interesting hookups. The project s longterm concept envisions the establishment of a community of registered users who take advantage of the secondhand shop s offerings not only to acquire clothing but also to establish social contacts within the network of human beings connected to the shop. The project extends the function of clothes as a storage medium by a adding a virtual component: in a "secondhand shop", each article is provided with a RFID tag. Through RFIDand web technology, the respective owners can store and read digital information on the individual garment. A virtual library of clothing is thus developed into which owners can add arbitrary information and multimedia contents, thus building up and layering each item s unique history of use, wear and re-use. Clothing can be seen in this way as a prototype for open source branding (Mairinger 2001) whose outcome is the creation of new forms of usergenerated brand identity. Used clothing provides the garment's owner himself the ability to add this virtual surplus value, according to his/her preferences. in addition, the surplus value adds up step by step with the number of (previous) owners a classic example of the network effect. Clothes trap and transport information about their owners. Used clothing uses this effect to exaggerate this identità-transmitting component and to turn in-use traces and captured memories into a key component in determining garment value. The second example is that of the Traces installation by London fashion company OkiNi and contemporary British artist Gavin Turk. The project asked a number of key individuals (contemporary artists, musicians, photographers, designers such as Paul Smith, ) to submit their favourite item of (used, worn, old, cherished, loved) clothing to OkiNi on the promise that they would be returned. The donators were asked to write a short statement about why the garment was so special to them. Gavin Turk then created a unique signature for the project, and a label bearing this was stitched into each of the garments, thereby altering, reconfiguring and recreating value and brand. The collection was then photographed, catalogued and displayed in a high profile installation at the flagship OkiNi store on Savile Row, London. A selection of the collection are to be faithfully reproduced via a unique collaboration between Gavin Turk, OkiNi, the original designer of the garment and the owner/wearer. Damage, wear and tear, history and stains will all be reproduced in the proposed new collection, which will be manufactured in very limited numbers for sale via Okini. The project thus charts the history and biography of the chosen garments, questioning how their value shifts through time, forming a deep palimpsest, a multitextured layering through time onto which people, places, practices and processes are interwoven. Bringing a range of participants and objects together in an unfamiliar assemblage that is simultaneously here and there; material and virtual; a process and a performance; momentary and longterm, the project explores the means by which value is imbued in clothes. How do the brand, the signature, the label and artistic creation interweave with wearing, display, performance, memory and history to create value? Why do the clothes we wear become invested with such layers of meaning? 8

12 Fashion creation and consumption encompass the constitution of social life, conjoining the global and the local, the relations between subject and object worlds, and questions of need, choice and citizenship. Clothes are a unique category of good, their very materialità means that they move through time and space not in a linear relation (design, creation, selection, purchase, use and disposal), but live through bodily contexts expressed through practices of wearing, display and performance. We inhabit our clothes, we live in and through them, they reflect and refract our corporeality, they have symbolic resonance and act as markers of identity. As such clothes are potent objects in self identification. Their value is rarely purely economically determined but rather depends on how a person sees value and meaning, how a garment can be reenchanted, reseen, loved anew. A garment is intimately intertwined with its owner. The body is a surface capable of infiltration, it is porous and leaky. Second hand garments are permeated by the bodily traces of another, resonant, investing a garment with memories of love and loss, regret and longing. 9

13 Conclusions So what does this all add to? It seems to us that there are two main interpretations. The first is both unremarkable and depressing - that this is little more than capital s la test attempts to extract surplus value. Key business functions have long been outsourced to low wage economies, particularly in the case of fashion. Is fashion coproduction and the decentrino of innovation simply the latest stage in the outsourcing process? The second interpretation is that these developments are part of a new technological democracy that allows for more public deliberation on products and, indeed, more input into their design. This interpretation may offer consumers a range of new ways to both engage with and be critical of commodification and their objects of desire. Some consumers the committed fans or otaku want to build and drive the communities into which they are hooked and are orbiting around in tighter circuits and at faster speeds; the deep end of fandom. Recent technological developments have enabled them to do this more fully and reveal the power of innovatory consumer communities to construct cultures of creativity around their enthusiasms. And in so doing, such collectivities of consumers may have found a means through which to emancipate themselves from market-imposed intelligence streams by creating communities of consumption practice. Whatever the case, it seems certain that the co-creation of value represents a significant overflow and reframing of the market. It up-turns, inverts, scrambles, mashes conventional organizational models of innovation, core competencies and nonimitability and reveals the very real likelihood that innovation may lie outside the organisation. This reframing of innovation has been generated by a powerful coalition of producers searching for extra profits, consumers searching to satisfy their desires and the blandishments of the cultural circuit of capital. Taken together, these developments indicate movements towards might be described as a general economic model of enthusiasm. It can be seen as a response to a motivation crisis in the core capitalist countries, as an attempt to overcome consumer cynicism caused by overexposure to marketing, and earlier attempts to understand and communicate with consumers. Taken together, this entire suite of processes empowers consumers, allowing them much more range and influence on the fashion industry than they (or we) could previously have foreseen, and pulling them into the process of value creation itself. I suspect that current developments will make for a very powerful reframing of the economy which will generate significant new understandings of what constitutes the producer and the consumer gouped around the idea of the market as a forum, of firms as enhanced networks and strategy as a process of continuous discovery. It is the coming together of desire. References Arvidsson, A. (2005) Brands: a critical perspective, Journal of Consumer Culture, 5, Barry, A. and Slater, D. (2002) Introduction: the technological economy, Economy and Society, 31, Belk, R. Ger, G. and Askegaard, S. (2003) 'The fire of desire: a multisited inquiry into consumer passion' Journal of Consumer Research 30: Blanchard, K. and Bowles, S. (1998) Raving Fans!: a revolutionary approach to customer service, Harper Collins, London. Demetriou, D. (2005) The Independent, London. Gregson, N. and Crewe, L. (2003) Second Hand Worlds Oxford: Berg Himanen, P. (2001) The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age, Secker & Warburg, London. Holt, D. (2002) 'Why do brands cause trouble? A dialectical theory of consumer culture and branding Journal of Consumer Research 29: Jenner (2004) Men and Collections New Holland Publications, UK 10

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