ARRASTRE DE UN REMOLQUE (SI DISPONE DE ENGANCHE).72

As has become clear by now, fashion performs an affective, amorphous, ever- changing and even mystical concept (Esposito, 2011; Moeran, 2015), and it is not at all readily apparent how fashion in different contexts is ‘done’ or ‘made’ in practice, or how something that intends to be fashionable is produced (Esposito, 2011) across time and space. The approach I take follows the call for organization studies to pay more attention to practical work (Barley and Kunda, 2001; Sergi, 2012), and especially the ‘nitty-gritty-details’ (Chia, 2004, 29) of ordinary fashion practice. For Schechner (2006, 22), ‘academic disciplines are most active at their ever-changing interfaces’, and I completely agree. For us to gain a deeper understanding of how a situated and emerging affective economy is organized ‘in action’ – in all its ephemerality, hybridity and ambiguity – and furthermore how it might reproduce and represent certain popular values of our society, we need to widen our focus on fashion and delve into a variety of scholarly debates and research fields. I have chosen to write at the intersection of fashion studies and organization studies to create a multidisciplinary analytical lens for the present study to critically explore interactions of human and non-human actions and activities, aesthetics, affects, bodies, resources and capitalism as they become enacted and entwined. Of course, these notions are all very broad. However, taken together, I believe moving across and in-between these notions as they ‘come together’ allows me to gain interesting and even critical understandings of the particularities and constitutive elements of everyday fashion organizing.

As I have already expressed, I am not studying the production of fashions per se. Instead, this qualitative piece of research mainly explores micro-level actions and ordinary interactions of those research subjects I have had the privilege of studying. I aim to provide rich and close-up descriptions from my perspective, as a curious, critical and affected researcher, to better understand fashion’s temporary activities of bricolage, ordering and fleeting value creation in situ and and ‘from the inside’. By so doing, I argue that we might gain valuable insight into how a very particular kind of affective economy is organized. Thus, this thesis has the potential to contribute rare empirical knowledge on how such an economy is organized, and actually builds upon techniques of surface manipulations, enchantment and bricolage. As such, my thesis might also add substance to a dialogue about what is, in common parlance, still widely considered frivolous, shallow and superficial.

In order to illustrate and do justice to the vibrant, spontaneous, spectacle- centred, image-saturated and intensely colourful world that I have studied, photographs constructed by me are included throughout this thesis. In addition to representing images constructed by me, I have also chosen to include some catwalk images from Copenhagen Fashion Week, and the source of all catwalk photographs is the Copenhagen Fashion Week image bank. These images – represented on pages 180, 200 and 219 – are published with permission. There is, I believe, added value in showing visual representations of the studied reality, especially as photographs possess ‘considerable emotional and rhetorical power’ (Gabriel, 2012, 232). Specifically, I have chosen to present and include untidy, spontaneous and perhaps even ’ugly’ snapshot images from the field that intend to do justice to the studied world. These images indicate the social practice of the studied organization, and re-present the bricolage and mess I encountered. Also, these images largely contrast more popular, stereotypical, polished or ’perfect’ fashion imaginary. Meanwhile, I am aware of the many critical discussions concerning the use of photographs in qualitative research and the field of organization studies, specifically (e.g. Bell and Davison, 2013; Bell, Warren and Schroeder, 2013; Shortt and Warren, 2012; Peltonen, 2014; Gabriel, 2011).

Constructing photographs is about objectifying reality in particular, often powerful ways (Bell and Davison, 2013). How I present photographs thus ‘speak[s] to my treatment and objectification of the other’ (McMurray, 2014).6

Throughout this study, I aim to draw the reader into an affective world by re- presenting those I have studied in empathic and reflexive ways. Rather than treating images merely as ‘accessories’ to the text, I allow them to take full spread or even ‘bleed over’ the pages. In this sense, I also make their placement more dominant in my text. By allowing images to take full spread and move the reader, I believe they can have a more cogent role in the argumentation of my findings, too. However, the photographs are deliberately not carefully analyzed in detail. Rather, they are presented as a visual bricolage with an intention to evoke, trigger and move the reader to sense and interpret (Gabriel, 2011). In other words, I knowingly include images for presentational and affective reasons primarily, and not as empirical material to be carefully analyzed by me.

Also, it appears justified to say that we – as researchers – tend to reduce complexity, uncertainty and equivocality in our writing. Naturally, this is a common strategy for making sense of complicated events in the world. At the same time, in simplifying and reducing complexity, nuance, and subtlety, we also inherently substitute and reduce understanding (Alvesson and Kärreman, 2001; Montuori, 2003). Throughout this thesis, I take ‘mess’, complexity, nuance and multiplicity very seriously. I strive to not reduce understanding. Rather, I am at home with complexity, uncertainty and disorder. I believe I have what Montuori (2003, 242) calls a ‘preference for complexity over simplicity’ – I

am puzzled, intrigued, excited and triggered by complexity rather than afraid of it (see Montuori, 2003). Therefore, I have also decided to present plenty of detailed written extracts of the empirical material, such as field notes, interview material and secondary data. By so doing, I believe I might also provide somewhat deeper, richer and thicker descriptions (although, not ‘thick’ as in Geertz’ fairly traditional, objectivist meaning, see Linstead (2015)) of the empirical material and my context. Hopefully, this also gives the reader the opportunity to more thoroughly take part in the research journey and again, raise experiences of the studied world. By presenting thick material throughout, I also do justice to an ethnographic approach. Meanwhile, my deliberate will to let the empirical material ‘speak’ for itself reveals certain limitations: the material is not always carefully analyzed by me. As I wish not to assume powerful authority as a writer, I knowingly present stories and images from the field that perhaps only loosely connect to my guiding questions, but still illustrate the richness and complexity of the fashion context, and say something interesting about a designer and his proximate team trying to make their lives meaningful. In other words, I deliberately raise interesting ideas which are not always fully developed in this thesis. Meanwhile, I have continuously questioned my knowledge of what I present as meaningful, and hope this reflexivity is evident throughout the written text.

My selectivity has had a driving role in what I have chosen to present as meaningful, and in line with other qualitative work, my research focus has developed and changed along the way. This qualitative process has not been particularly linear, but rather analytical and ‘messy’, representing a reflexive and critical style of working. I have not been guided by positivist ideals or the often- dominant principle of ‘gap spotting’ of the social sciences. Instead, my aim has consistently been to capture moment-to-moment realities of organization and glimpses of organizing. Despite my empirical interest in everyday encounters, actions, events and the many things that fashion designers actually do in their everyday lives, this thesis is also driven by theoretical ambition. Evans (2003) notes that fashion scholars have rarely been able to demonstrate both theoretical and empirical deepness simultaneously, but rather have focused on one dimension or the other (see e.g. Thornquist, 2005, Evans, 2003, 2007 as exceptions). I hope this thesis reads as a serious effort in joining fashion practice and theorizing. Specifically, I have related my empirical observations to ideas about fashion, organization and bricolage by reflexively moving back and forth

between theories and empirical material in an open, incomplete and flexible manner. I will also ponder on those alternative ideas that this thesis could have developed further. However, to establish some clarity in my work at this point, the following questions are considered central for my study:

What do people do when they ‘do fashion’? How and through what kind of micro-level interactions, activities and practices is fashion ‘done’ in moments of organization, and how do these activities further organize, shape and construct a particular kind of economy?

The guiding questions as presented above evidently depend on a number of things. Influenced by process thinking in the practice perspective (e.g. Sergi, 2012; Maaninen-Olsson and Müllern, 2009), I have chosen to focus on the diverse, affective workings and daily activities of one specific fashion designer and his proximate team rather than trying to account for a plurality of different, situated fashion realities. Also, I do not raise the question here of whether all the actions, burning enthusiasm, manipulation of surface and hard work observed actually ‘work’ or not, or if my research subjects temporally succeed (or not) in achieving what they daily strive for in their context. It is also worth pointing out that fashion is still fairly new to academic research in Finland. Whereas fashion studies have become an established academic discipline globally (e.g. Gindt and Wallenberg, 2009; McNeil and Miller, 2014), plenty has happened behind the fashion design scenes in the Finnish context as I have carried out this study. For instance, Finnish high fashion design – if such a well-defined segment actually exists – is currently becoming more appreciated and known abroad than it has been before, and many debates are now being raised about the significance and value of fashion export as part of the creative industries and cultural production in Finland more broadly. Still, in Finland fashion has traditionally not enjoyed the high status of a serious form of export business or serious scholarly topic, but this seems to be changing slowly (e.g. Aakko, 2016). The paradoxically low status of (feminine) fashion in comparison to the appreciation of (more masculine) industrial design in the Finnish context has also triggered the studied fashion designer to speak up throughout, and I will return to these discussions later. In what follows, I present and discuss the theoretical framework of this thesis. Before doing so, however, I need to briefly explain how I approach theory and activities of theorizing.