You can’t always get what you want: Unsustainable identity projects in the fashion system

Abstract

This paper extends the literatures on both fashion systems and marketplace identity projects by investigating the identity trajectories experienced by women who strive for successful careers as fashion models. It argues that while end‐consumers in a symbolic field such as fashion may experience nearly limitless postmodern potential for identity play, those individuals who strive for positioning in the production systems of such fields have more limited scope for identity construction so long as they remain within the field. Unless they possess or can acquire significant symbolic and social capital, actors low in power within a field, such as aspiring fashion models, will typically face limited success in sustaining the identity they strive for. The analysis thus traces an arc from identity emergence to identity abandonment. It identifies two routes to identity re‐construction, both of which invoke cultural discourses of authenticity to cope with the abandonment of the identity project within the fashion system. The paper contributes to the marketing literature on fashion systems by focusing on how structured systems of social position matter to individual actors struggling to achieve a certain standing within a symbolic field. At the same time, it furthers our understanding of marketplace identity quests by shedding light on how market actors cope when confronting unsustainable identity projects.

Keywords:

• identity
• agency
• power
• institutional fields
• fields of cultural production
• fashion
• fashion models

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank those faculty and students at the Schulich School of Business who have discussed aspects of this paper with them, and have provided encouragement on the larger project in which it is embedded. The first author in particular would like to acknowledge the generous support of her doctoral studies by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes

1. An occupation is a “female job” if it has a female concentration at or above the national female labor force concentration (46%). A non‐traditional occupation for women is one in which women comprise 25% or less of total employment. See the U.S. Women’s Bureau: http://www.dol.gov/wb/factsheets/Qf-nontra.htm.

2. See U.S. DOL, BLS, Employment and Earnings, Annual Averages, Table 11, “Employed persons by detailed occupation, sex, race, and Hispanic or Latino, ethnicity,” 2006, http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.pdf. See also Table 39: http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat39.pdf.

3. The distinction between the commercial and editorial sphere will be subsequently explained in the findings section.