Performing New Values: Fashion Brands in Post-Socialist Bulgaria

Abstract

In post-socialist societies, marketing and consumption play a crucial role for what is regarded as value. Assuming ‘consumer capitalism’ as an important feature of the neoliberal project, I argue that marketing theories and practices produce market societies in Eastern and Central Europe. To highlight the reflexive adaptation of ‘consumer capitalism’ by producers, marketers and consumers, this essay discusses fashion brand promotion in Bulgaria. The case studies illustrate how the transformation of modes of valuation can be understood as a process of performative modernisation and marketisation. It appears that the ‘local’ adjustment of ‘global’ concepts of marketing and consumption leads to new formations of value in spatial, temporal and subjective terms.

Notes

The corresponding research project ‘Marken(t)räume’ was sponsored by the German Research Foundation (DFG), code ER 475/3-1. Many thanks to the guest editors, Sonia Hirt, Christian Sellar and Craig Young, as well as to the anonymous reviewers for very instructive comments on previous versions of the article. Special thanks to Christian Geiselmann for his major contributions to the empirical groundwork, including some of the interviews, and for very helpful comments.

¹ Author's interview with a Bulgarian fashion house manager (anonymous), Ruse, 20 April 2008.

² For geographical approaches to phenomena of brands and branding, see Pike (2009, 2011).

³ Scott Lash and John Urry place emphasis on the ‘reflexive accumulation in economic life’ and the aesthetic reflexivity of production and consumption (Lash & Urry 1994, p. 5). Stressing the economic power of symbols and brands Louise Crewe also uses the notion ‘brand capitalism’ (Crewe 2004, p. 205).

⁴ Hassler (2003, p. 243) for Indonesia; Tokatli (2007), Tokatli and Kızılgün (2009) for Turkey; and Pickles et al. (2006), Evgeniev (2008) and Evgeniev and Gereffi (2008) for Bulgaria.

⁵ Official figures on average salaries must be read with a pinch of salt since it is not unusual in Bulgarian private economy in general to pay 600 levs (€300), but to declare only the official minimal wage to the financial authorities, and to thus save taxes and social insurance.

⁶ Bulgarian Ministry of Economy and Energy, Strategy ‘Perspective 2010: Development of the Bulgarian Textile Sector’, 2006, unpublished document. Editing the strategy was a joint initiative of the Bulgarian government and the apparel and textile sector in 2005, supported by the German federally-owned development organisation gtz (‘Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit’) who subcontracted the task to a German consultant (Weis Consulting) implementing the project with several Bulgarian and international partners.

⁷ Vasil Radoinosvki: Sector report at the meeting of the Bulgarian Association of Apparel and Textile Producers and Exporters (BAPIOT), Ruse, 24 April 2010 (unpublished presentation).

⁸ Vasil Radoinosvki: Sector report at the meeting of the Bulgarian association of apparel and textile producers and exporters (BAPIOT), Ruse, 24 April 2010 (unpublished presentation).

⁹ Author's interview with Vera Akhundova, Battibaleno manager, Sofia, 5 November 2010.

¹⁰ Author's interview with Vera Akhundova, Battibaleno manager, Sofia, 5 November 2010.

¹¹ In Bulgaria ‘Europe’ typically is used as a notion for ‘Western Europe’ or the core of the ‘old’ European Union prior to the eastward enlargement. This could indicate that many Bulgarians do not feel they really belong to ‘Europe’.

¹² Author's interview with Vera Akhundova, Battibaleno manager, Sofia, 5 November 2010.

¹³ Christian Geiselmann's interview with Evgeniya Zhivkova, Sofia, 23 September 2010.

¹⁴ On her life and death, see Atanasova (2004).

¹⁵ See www.jenistyle.com/#/history/, accessed 20 January 2012.

¹⁶ Christian Geiselmann's interview with Kostadin Marinov, owner of the shoe brand Marino Costa, Sofia, 15 September 2010.

¹⁷ Author's interview with a fashion manager (anonymous), Sofia, 4 November 2010.

¹⁸ Author's interview with a representative of the Bulgarian branch of a market research company, Sofia, 2 April 2007.

¹⁹ Callon (1998a, p. 27) puts it like this: ‘Marketing as a set of tools and practices taken from practitioners and reconfigured by “academic” marketing specialists, fell, after numerous transformations and generalizations, on the head of the practitioners’.

²⁰ Group discussion, Sofia, 10 March 2011.

²¹ Christian Geiselmann's interview with Mirela Bratova, owner of the fashion brand of the same name, Sofia, 14 September 2010.