How High and Low are Made: Aesthetic Knowledge and Symbolic Boundaries in Fashion Photo Shoots

• In Event: 179 - Regular Session. Cultural Studies 2: Aesthetic Choices (and Constraints): From Creation to Mediation

Abstract

This study proposes a ‘bottom-up’, micro-sociological analysis of the high-low culture division well-known in sociology. Drawing on observations of fashion photo shoots and interviews with fashion professionals, we examine how field structure and social practice come together in ‘doing aesthetics’. We focus on the fashion photo shoot, a unique moment of cultural, embodied co-creation at the heart of the field of fashion images: a field strictly divided into high (editorial) and low (commercial). Combining Becker’s art world perspective with recent work on the situated, embodied production of (aesthetic) knowledge, we analyse aesthetic interactions in concrete situation rather than starting from field structures or organizational dynamics. We show how the high-low divide is enacted and (re)created both institutionally, eg as organizational constraint or routine, and aesthetically as stylistic convention or quality standard. These enactments of the high-low divide mark symbolic boundaries between the prestigious, arty world of high fashion; and the local and cheerful world of low fashion. We show how practical decisions actors make in this defining situation, from the model’s hairdo to lighting, reproduce and produce boundaries, standards and conventions. Structural elements acquire an existence only in concrete situations. Thus: this is where high and low are made.

Authors

• Elise C Laan, University of Amersterdam

• Giselinde Kuipers, University of Amsterdam