伦敦国王大学（King's College London）文化与创意产业CCI（Culture and Creative Industry）研究生选修课美学经济与美学市场（The Aesthetic Economy and Aesthetic Markets ）论文
How useful are Bourdieu’s concepts of field, habitus and capital for understanding fields of cultural production and how have these concepts been applied to the analysis of specific markets?
In today’s world, the fashion industry is one of the most important and creative industries, and has a strong impact on people’s lives. To analyze the fashion industry, a famous contemporary French sociologist must be discussed, that is Bourdieu. Bourdieu’s theories about field, habitus, and capital have a significant influence on global fashion markets. Because some of the most important factors that influence the particular clothing choices are people values and attitudes, their tendencies toward conforming or individuality, and their personalities. In order to show how Bourdieu’s theories shape cultural production, detailed markets research are indispensable. This essay will firstly present an overview of the concepts of field, habitus, and capital, and followed by analyzing the relationship between these three concepts and cultural production. Then, it will explain how useful Bourdieu’s concepts of field, habitus, and capital are in understanding fields of cultural production. After that, it will analyze two clothing markets: avant-garde and streetwear for common consumption. Finally, it will put forward a conclusion regarding influences of Bourdieu’s theories on the fashion industry.
Bourdieu believes that social classes are not only defined by people's position in relations of production, but also are defined through class habitus, which is normally associated with class status. He points out that a class can be defined by its being, and its perceiving. Social classes can be seen in the relations of cultural production and one’s consumption, especially when one’s consumption is not got showing off. (Bourdieu, 1983)
Although Bourdieu adopts the theory of class from Marx and Weber, his concept of class is very different from both. In Bourdieu's view, in order to obtain benefits, people will fight with each other in specific social fields or social spaces with the aid of their own capital. As the result of fights, the people in the field or social space with a similar position will constitute a class (Bourdieu, 1983). In other words, class or the social space, refers to subject groups with a similar position, similar condition, and similar constraints. Because these people have the same position, they have the same life situation; therefore, they will have a similar disposition (Bourdieu 1930--2003). These similarities, conversely, lead to a common practice.
In order to analyze how useful Bourdieu’s concepts of field,
habitus, and capital are in understanding fields of cultural production, the
meaning of field, habitus, and capital should be explained. Firstly, Field is a
very important concept in Bourdieu’s sociology. He defines field as an
objective relationship, as a network or a configuration in various positions (Bourdieu,
1983). Bourdieu thinks that in a highly-differentiated society, the social world
is a combination of lots of small social worlds with relative independence;
these small social worlds have their own space for logic and inevitable
objective relationships, and their own logic and inevitability will dominate
the logic and inevitability in other fields. Every field has a market as a bond
to combine symbolic commercial producers and consumers (Bourdieu 1930--2003).
Secondly, habitus in Bourdieu’s theory is not a habit; it is a kind of art existing in a generative ability (Bourdieu, 1983). Habitus belongs to the scope of "mental structure"; it is a kind of "subjective social structure" but not pure subjectivity (Bourdieu, 1983). Instead, it is an objective structure of subjectivity. There is no isolated existing habitus only associated with a particular field. Habitus is the unity of individuality and sociality (King, 2000). As a kind of subjective disposition system and mental structure, habitus exist in body or biological unit and has its own individuality. Meanwhile, habitus is the expression of one’s sociality and has social subjectivity (Boyne, 2002). In short, habitus exists as a consequence of social stratification.
The third concept is capital. Bourdieu's capital is not only in the economic
sense but also comes in various forms, including economic capital, social
capital, cultural capital, and symbolic capital. Bourdieu said that capital came
from accumulated labor; and when labor is private, or its basis is occupied by
some cliques, this kind of labor allows them to possess social resources(Bourdieu,
1983). Capital has its own
characteristic of autonomy, generativity, and permutability. People with an
abundant social capital can obtain more opportunities and consequently gain
more economic capital; for example, a man with strong economic capital can send
his children to a better school, earn higher cultural capital. Capital is
closely related to power. The quantity and type of capital that a person has
decides his position in the social space and his power (Boyne,
2002).
Influences given by field to cultural production can be separated in to two directions. First direction is restricted production. The cultural production of this field is sacred objects, it focus on people’s spiritual level and reflect a high cultural taste. Because these products are rare,obscure and difficult, it usually only attract niche consumer groups and reject to be commercialized in a large-scale. Second direction is large scale production which provides profane projects. These cultural productions are designed to cater public taste, so compared with restricted production, large scale production is more easy to understand and closer to people’s daily life.
Habitus’ impacts on cultural production have profound sociality. From this perspective, cultural production are tight related to one’s family background, educated level, working environment and one’s professional knowledge. Habitus exist in one’s bodily dispositions like shape, movement, posture and one’s taste for cultural goods. And people with similar habitus will appreciate similar cultural production.
Capital’s influence to cultural production can be analyze by two points of view; “objective cultural capital” and cultural capital. The biggest difference between "objective cultural capital” and the cultural capital is that the former is of material and information, for example, literature, painting, monuments, equipment. It can be inherited from its materiality. For example, one can pass down a painting from one generation to another; this is the same kind of inheritance as economic capital. However, Bourdieu thinks that economic capital inheritance is always being censored and restricted, such as by the taxation limit of succession law (Webb, Schirat and Danaher, 2002). Therefore, the objective cultural capital may be better than the economic capital because the former tradition is more secretive. However, the objective cultural capital inheritance also has weaknesses: it can be inherited only by legal ownership. This is the premise of this special performance. In other words, inheritance is not limited to a painting or to the use of a machine. At this point, objective cultural capital is the same as the reified capital: both submit to the laws of inheritance. In Bourdieu's view, cultural products are objective cultural capitals unified with economic capital. Cultural products can show the materiality, and can also show the symbolic meaning, cultural products presupposed cultural capital (King, A. (2000).
Because of this comprehensiveness, cultural products always differ in characteristics from ordinary products, primarily in terms of use: the economic capital of ordinary products only needs simple and ordinary consumption; it can be used and consumed, but the owners of the cultural products must find a way to show the product as reified for owners to get special preconditions of capital.
Analyzing the niche brands of dark avant-garde fashion based on the theory of Bourdieu, it can be understood that one of his important theories would be that social relations deeply influence cultural production and make it a reproduction of social class. The avant-garde is recognized as being at the top of the pyramid in the fashion clothing circle. It used to consisted by some extreme niche brands and has not been recognized by some high-class mainstream fashion buyers until recently. The avant-garde refers to clothes that are ahead of mainstream fashion. It is full of creativity and not fettered by old conventions; it breaks tradition and seeks constant improvement.
Avant-garde consists of certain key characteristics. First, in avant-garde fashion, novel techniques are used in fabric, while fanciful or extremely high-end raw materials are selected (Crane, 1997). The founder of C-diem once threw leather into a barrel full of oil for ten years before taking it out and making leather products out of it. He even buried leather in a desert in Afghanistan for it to receive the “essence of the nature” for a decade. M.a+ has released a shirt worth more than 2,000 Euros, but the global output of this kind of fabric is only 2 cm annually.
Second, avant-garde clothes enjoy bold and unique tailoring (Crane,1997). There is no doubt that the avant-garde circle is full of talented designers who are also experts in tailoring; thus, laymen (pure buyers) would consider it very novel. For example, Carol Christian Poell (CCP), the king of avant-garde fashion, makes tailoring an art. She is a designer, who does not regard clothes as a vassal of the human body and tries to remove the body so as to give clothes a 3-dimemsional form. It is the buyer who should fit his or her body into the clothes; thus, the clothes of CCP often give people a sense of having an “exoskeleton”. Since 2000, CCP has started to focus on shoulder and elbow tailoring to make clothes bend naturally, as if they have their own joints. Since 2009, designers have begun paying attention to the finger part and have inserted metal gaskets in specific places to make outfits look like a flexible and vivid body without a head.
Third, there are many innovations that refresh the cognition of the public about fashion (Nicewonge, 2015). For example, there is a CCP metal boot that looks very weird, but so long as one uses a small hammer to produce one's favorite shape of boots, the buyer can wear these to go shopping outside.
Fourth, avant-garde clothes are 100% hand-made and
intolerant of products made in the assembly line. This principle is obeyed by
most of the brands with avant-garde concepts, and the output of avant-garde
clothes is very small due to having small numbers in a team. As a result, there
are often 20 or 30 pieces, or only one piece in the world, for a single
product, and some brands even release about 100 products in a year (Crane,
1997).
Fifth, avant-garde clothes hardly appear on any catwalk, advertisement, or business interviews. This is not a fixed “rule”, yet it is obeyed by everyone. However, in recent years, there have been more brands appearing on the T-stage and in fashion shows in Paris. Only those “extremely high-level” brands still adhere to this rule. Specifically, brands that still insist on hand-made and small-output clothes are obeying the rule, but brands that wish to enter the commercial circle such as Damir Doma (DD) and Boris Bidjan Saberi (BBS) have begun to change.
Sixth, the buying channels of avant-garde clothes are very limited, but in recent years, the situation has been getting better. There has been an increasing number of outlet shops in the world. In the past, some brands have been very difficult to acquire, because they are sold in only a few shops around the world.
Unlike television or airplanes that have appeared as new inventions in a
certain point in history, avant-garde clothes have existed in every era and
even in every circle. At any time, so long as a designer creates an advanced
work, it could be regarded as avant-garde. Thus, there is truly no “founder” of
avant-garde clothes. In retrospect, there are two well-known Japanese fashion
design masters, Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo, who enjoy great reputations in
the circle of dark avant-garde fashion (Munroe, 2004). CDG, an empire
well-established in the current commercial fashion circle, was also a pioneer
20 years ago.
As is described in the theory of “symbolic violence” by Bourdieu, social life is essentially competitive and even violent. There exists a competition for benefits in economic resources, legal effects, or social relations (Rocamora, 2002) Thus, the avant-garde fashion was faced with many troubles at the beginning. In the fashion circle, dominant brands, or mainstream luxury brands, often possess the majority of resources and are often opposed by newcomers. Mainstream brands with long historical and cultural connections are often very conservative so that they can earn profits from their accumulated resources. In the eyes of these mainstream brands, the avant-garde brands are full of subversive strategies and radicalism and thus are often called “parvenus” and are turned down by the fashion press (Bourdieu, 1983).
Since the 1920s, avant-garde clothes have gone through an incubation period for nearly 70 years. Generations of talented designers, well-known for their avant-garde designing concepts, have appeared in the history of fashion, and among these, Paco Rabanne from the 60s, Issey Miyake from the 70s, Helmut Lang & Morgan Puett from the 80s, as well as Hussein Chalayan, Kei Kegami, and Bless from the 90s. However, avant-garde brands failed to grow prosperously in that unfavorable environment. Some of the designers mentioned above have sold their brands and changed their styles, or jumped to other industries, while those who remained only ended up with deression or no news (Joannou, 2012). Martin Margiela(MMM), once was a strong and well-known avant-garde brand, has also given in to the trend of commercialization. Line Zero (Artisanal Series) of MMM was the only serie not in mainstream fashion, then lost its style since the retirement of designer Margiela.
The first turning point in dark avant-garde clothes occurred in the 1980s. When students graduating from Antwerp Royal Academy of Fine Arts followed their dreams, driving a broken rented truck, hosted an avant-garde fashion press conference outside the London fashion week, they shocked many fashion critics of the time (Martínez, 2007). These students were lacking in money, so they rented a truck and some shabby acousto-optic equipment. Though the equipment was inferior, this guerilla-style press conference caught the attention of the British media (Martínez, 2007). In that era, people were greatly affected by a variety of queer concepts and novel ideas of fashion. These young people from Antwerp also accepted some novel and original concepts of fashion design, and started to add an anti-luxury style to their works, involving super large outfits, extremely long sleeves, external liners, and formal evening dresses made by crumpled fabrics (Martínez, 2007). Their advanced design concept, exquisite tailoring, and original techniques of colorful collages shocked the conventional fashion circle at that time. From then on, the six “bold and reckless” youths were called “The Antwerp Six” by the British media; they are Walter van Beirendonck, Ann Demeulemeester, Marina Yee, Dirk van Saene, Dries van Noten, and Dirk Bikkembergs. Antwerp, meanwhile, became the center of the avant-garde fashion map (Martínez, 2007). As a result, Belgian designers have gained unwavering avant-garde status in the global fashion press.
In the last decade of the 19th century, well-established luxury brands began global expansion into the mass market. Logo-designers dominated the market, but avant-garde clothes seemed to be lost in dark and could find no way out. However, in the depth of the night, there is often a beam of light. Three unknown designers, Maurizio Altieri, Carol Christian Poell, and Rick Owens, successively established their own brands in 19th. It was these three designers who later became the benchmark icons of the avant-garde clothes field. They have not only lifted the subversive creativity, art expressiveness, brand reputation, and customer recognition to an unprecedented level, but also contributed to the establishment of the whole industry chain of the avant-garde field, including in a series of procedures like raw material selection, production, retail, and market support.
Based on the theory of Bourdieu, the so-called taste of a person is related to his or her class and is developed from the family or from early experience. (Webb, J., Schirato, T. and Danaher, G. 2002) In other words, taste is collective, social, and objective. Thus, it is said that taste classifies the classifier. Taste classifies people into different groups. When mainstream fashion began to accept avant-garde design, the original high-end customers gradually became followers of avant-garde clothes. It is because of these customers' power and wealth that wearing dark avant-garde clothes became seen as good taste. Among the buyers of dark avant-garde fashion, 90% were initially lovers of mainstream clothes and luxury products, but as time went by, they became more aware of fashion and found that mainstream products could never meet their demands and curiosities. Compared with wearing normal luxury clothes, or use logos to personal wealth and status, truly extraordinary designs are more attractive to some niche customers. They wanted novel and original works, even these cloth sometimes be seen as difficult to understand or even strange to common people. What matters is whether a design is out of sincerity and originality, or whether the clothes are unique or not; thus, newcomers are accepted well in this circle. In such a niche circle, compared to luxury product buyers who love to “show their wealth and status”, avant-garde buyers prefer to please themselves (Buck-Morss,2001). So long as they get their favorite unique objects, a great sense of satisfaction will be created and whether the origin of the object, the price, or status is known by others or not is not important anymore. (Mahood, 2002)
In addition, avant-garde buyers are extremely loyal to brands. So long as a designer sticks to their principles, works with earnest attitudes, keeps innovating, and seeks constant improvement, fans would follow and support this person. Though there are only a small number of buyers in the circle, the astonishing consumptive power of these buyers is at least equivalent to, of even stronger than that of mainstream fashion buyers (Buck-Morss, 2001). The consuming power of avant-garde buyers is no doubt pretty high.
Bourdieu believes that class refers to the group of actor subjects who have similar positions, who are given similar conditions and who receive similar constraints in a social space (Forchtner and Schneickert, 2016). Because of the similar positions, these actors would have similar living environments and thus similar dispositions. These similarities, in turn, would lead to their similar practices. That explains why these scare avant-garde clothing are chased after by these fashion buyers.
Before the analysis of the other more mass culture market, a book named Class written by Fussell should be introduced, because he not only use a sociological theoretical basis to talk about class status publicly, but he also does not hide his attitude towards analysis of class and his position. He says that every person’s class status is shown through their clothing, housing, and eating habits. (Fussell, 1984). When Fussell's theory and Bourdieu's theory are combined to analyze the street wear clothing market, the impact of cultural capital on a person's clothing consumption can be clearly seen.
Clothing style is enough to expose a person's social class. It has to be admitted that social labor division is more refined and specialized; it makes social class differences more easily visible and makes it easier for people to form a set of simple impressions of conventional class. One principle to point out is color code: people from different social strata has certain differences in their clothing color of choice (Fussell, 1984). A higher class of people prefer a single piece of simple attire, low profile, and calm black, white, and gray occupies most of their closet space, while lower class people are more likely to choose bright-color collections. (Fussell, 1984) Although the color code principle given by Fussell may not completely certain, we should admit that street wear, which is a large scale production, offers more colorful choices. And street wear brands like Topshop, H&M, Zara will design items with fashion color of the year. Bourdieu believes habitus is an embodiment of society on the body, in the field of a person, and it makes people feel comfortable, just like at home (Bourdieu, 1983). A person's social or work environment will have a certain impact on his/her clothing; some colorful dresses may be popular in ordinary consumer groups, but may not suit some formal occasions. Different classes lead to different habitus. Simply transplanting a habitus from one field to another will inevitably lead to unsuitable cultural production (Wagner and McLaughlin, K, 2015).
Another principle in Fussell's book is known as the quality principle: high class people are more willing to wear natural fabrics or organic fabrics (cotton, wool, silk) in clothes, while lower class people tend to dress dress in synthetic or artificial clothes (Fussell, 1984). Of course, this is related to people's income level, but it also effect by field and habitus. Street wear designers may not choose organic fabrics, which are costly and not durable, but may design some cloth more comfortable or functional. In 1952, a boy named Levi came to California . It was the gold rush at that time, he saw a lot of ragged people are busy washing mud in the river to get gold, so he immediately tried to use canvas to make trousers to those gold diggers. As the trouser is solid, durable, and very fit ,it soon gained its popularity. But his jeans is not perfect, a gold diggers told Levi his trousers are torn easily, it does not matter somewhere else be torn, but can not be pocket in any case. Then Levi went back to the factory and added copper nails on the pocket. Several copper nails not only reinforced pocket, but also adds beauty of the jeans. They are more popular than before, and later the brand become the world's most famous jeans brand Levi's. From this example, it is not difficult to see that field and habitus impact cultural production deeply. Although at present, most people can afford at least one or two expensive dresses, the fabric and the quality of clothes still shows the wearer’s classes.
In Bourdieu's class theory, the most striking aspect is his analysis of how class habitus shows the taste of people and how such taste makes clear class boundaries. He believes that with the three dimensions of social space, namely capital quantity, proportion of capital structure, and social class structure, people's unique class habitus is formed. In this way, the members of different classes, always with their class habitus constraints and their own unique class character, have different tastes, and represent themselves by choosing different ways of life (Bourdieu,1983). The class identity indicates the relationship and distance between one person and other classes. Bourdieu pointed out that taste is controlled by distribution, which serves as a social guide for people with specific positions in a social space to head towards a social status with their characteristics, to the appropriate position of the possessor or consumer.
In Bourdieu's work, the relationship between class habitus and taste are described and analyzed. He pointed out that because of the different economic conditions, two kinds of basic class taste are produced: the pursuit of luxury and freedom, and the pursuit of necessities (Bourdieu, 1983). The former is the embodiment of good economic conditions of ruling class habitus, while the latter is the performance of lower class habitus. Two kinds of opposite tastes are two different kinds of class habitus.
The ruling class has abundant capital, which is higher than the average; they are not troubled by secular livelihood problems. Therefore, they pursue "free taste", or the preference for non-secular objects, with an "aesthetic nature". This kind of "aesthetic nature" on the one hand, shows class habitus; on the other hand, this further distinguishes the ruling class from other classes through the special appreciation of art.
Contrary to the ruling class, the lower class only owns a small amount of capital, and their attention must be given to basic survival, so they have a taste for the necessities of life. They pursue products with practical functions and non-formalization. However, Bourdieu did not believe this pursuit of practical consumer taste was the result of being deprived; instead, it precisely reflects the preferences of the lower class habitus. As a symbol or as a kind of practice, consumption is not only decided by the field, but also by habitus. In developed industrial society, where the standard of living is very high, the lower class prefer cheap products not because they cannot afford to buy more expensive clothes, but because of their habitus. In their taste, there is a preference for cheap and affordable consumer goods
In conclusion, from the research on the avant-garde and street wear for common consumption, different cultural productions, which are deeply influenced by field, habitus, and capital become clear. Through the analysis of Bourdieu’s theory, it has to be admitted that a person's dress does not only reflect a taste and economic level, but can also indirectly reveal their social class. A person cannot be judged based on appearance nor can anyone regard clothing as equivalent to a person's social status, but further considerations are required to explain what social division of labor brings to people’s daily lives and whether the choice of clothing contains positions and a response to social demand.
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