Home Bias in the Fashion and Cultural Industries

• In Event: Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 9: Culture

Abstract

Places are aggregates. The combination of spatial and material properties (e.g., the division of labor) with intangible assets (e.g., social capital and symbolic resources) can produce surprising and worthy innovations. It can also produce mystified social representations. The fashion and apparel industries are replete with mythologies of place in both production and consumption. On the one hand, a geographic “home bias” celebrates domestic agglomerations in the Western fashion capitals of Paris, New York, London, and Milan. Most literature still assumes the centrality of these special places. On the other hand, the mechanics of global value chains are decentering innovation. Fashion and textile designs are increasingly sourced from semi-peripheral economies like India, yet these “non-places” remain invisible within the attention space of the fashion world. A political economy lens on place in the fashion and apparel industries helps to bring together disparate literatures on production and consumption.

The content of this paper begins with the geography of production and ends with the fetishism of consumption. The production story starts with the claim that home bias—-a preference for domestic investment—-impedes recognition of internationally distributed work. Innovation is in fact decentralizing at the global level, yet nostalgia for manufacturing remains visible in communities across the U.S. The consumption story is driven by brand equity in a limited attention space of media. Flagship retailers and fashion shows offer a glamorous “front” that obscures the material realities of global value chains.

Author

• Alexander Hoppe, WZB Berlin Social Science Center