Fashioning Professionals

Book excerpt: From artist to curator, couturier to fashion blogger, 'creative' professional identities can be viewed as social practices, enacted, performed and negotiated through the media, the public, and industry. Fashioning Professionals addresses what it means to be a creative professional, historically and in the digital age, as new ways of working and doing business have given rise to new professional identities. Bringing together critical reflections from international researchers, the book spans fashion, design, art, architecture, and advertising. It examines both traditional and emergent roles in creative industries, from advertising executives and surrealist artists to mannequin designers, pop stylists, bloggers, makers and design curators. The book reveals how professional identities are continually in a state of fashioning, through style, taste, gender and cultural representation, highlighting moments of friction and flux in the creative labour of the global economy. Interweaving critical perspectives from fashion and design history with sociology and cultural theory, Fashioning Professionals addresses a burgeoning area of research as we enter new terrain in fashion and the creative industries.