Globalization and Expertise: The 'Lohn' System and the Changes in Nature and the Role of Fashion Trends and Sustainability Discourses

• In Event: Transnational and Trans-Ideological Connections: Cultural Relations between the Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe and the Capitalist West II

Abstract

This paper examines the interconnectedness between aesthetic, political and epistemic practices in the Cold War period by focusing on the textile industry and the development of the “Lohn” system in Romania (the externalisation of industrial production towards countries with lower wages). It borrows from Shapin & Schaffer (1985) approach related to the analysis of the knowledge production as a social and political philosophy, and it deconstructs the design practices within the textiles industry by looking into the nature of design expertise that allowed the functioning of the global market during the Cold War period.
The paper focuses on the development of the international colour trends forecasting expertise and investigates the textiles industry’s capacities, practices and institutions in the context of East-West economic exchanges. By opposing the expertise claims of Western trendsetters such as Li Edelkoort (2015) with the statements of Romanian designers that worked in the textile industry during the 1980s and archive materials related to East-West economic exchanges, the entry aims to show that trendsetters decisions, design practices and communication styles reflect not only an investigation of customers’ taste, as it is generally claimed, but they were also the translation of macro-economic exchanges between East/West. By doing this, the paper shows that the international colour trend setters’ expertise was a hybrid one, embodying cultural and aesthetic elements, economic interdependencies, technological constraints and political decisions.
While anthropologists such as Katherine Verdery (“What was Socialism and What comes next?”, (1996) have focused on how the party-state managerial elite subverted the system from within and ended up side-dealing with the Westerners, there are still questions about how the Western economies reacted and relied on the Socialist industry for their production of goods. This investigation aims to help to answer some of the questions of how a “shortage economy” (Kornai, 1980) was able to fulfil the needs of a consumerist society and its fast cycles, of how two economic systems, one based on “flexible accumulation” (Harvey, 1990) and the other one based on “soft budgeting” (Kornai, 1980), succeed to function together.

Author

• Tincuta Heinzel, Loughborough U (UK)