Page 115 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

Consumer Culture and Fashion Studies 99

numerous knock - offs of designer handbags for women attest. They cost
very little and look exactly like the much more expensive originals. What
this suggests is that the value of things – how they look to others especially
– becomes our own value, our own sense of worth. We feel better when
others look at us, envy us, and aspire to be as high status as us.
High - end designer fashion brings together art and economics. Desig-
ners seek minor differentiations of dress that continually distinguish the
clothing of an elite who can afford to spend a great deal of money on things
whose duration may be quite short from the mass market, ready - to - wear
clothing of everyone else. Because such high levels of creativity go into
designer clothes, they have a perfectly non - economic claim to superiority
and often set the example for mass market clothing. But popular clothing
culture also is a realm of creativity, and the two often vie with one another.
Punk clothing style established black as the color to imitate before
designers could catch up, and when designers decided longer dresses
were “ in ” as a way of displacing the mini - skirts of the 1960s, women in the
1970s refused to go along and chose “ hot pants ” instead. But designers
were successful in pillaging a gypsy style for women in the 1990s that
emphasized loose skirts with folds, dramatic dark color contrasts, sweater
jackets, and long scarves from the arts counterculture and turning it into
a mainstream style.
Consumer culture is necessarily bound up with economic life, and
given that the kind of economic life we humans have so far constructed
for ourselves is one that depends on a circle of production and con-
sumption in which the second term plays a crucial role in sustaining the

first (which in turn sustains life on earth through payment for work),
the link between consumption and economic life is worth attending to.
As usual with economics, a fair amount of self - interested unfairness
immediately grabs one ’ s attention, from the sweat shops of underpaid
laborers in Southeast Asia that produce clothing for high - income con-
sumers elsewhere to the underpaid deliverers of consumer services such
as Starbucks coffee in advanced economic settings like North America
and Europe. Something as apparently simple as sugar in English tea had
behind it a reality of African slavery in the sugar - growing region of the
world. And a struggle continues to establish “ fair trade ” rules that will
assist commodity growers in getting a fairer price on the world market
for their goods.
Advertising is central to consumer culture. It consists of a mixture of
rhetoric, theater, and visual design. It is rhetorical because it makes an