Bloomsbury Fashioning Professionals: Identity and Representation at Work in the Creative Industries

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 the key question of what it means to be a creative professional both historically and today. How does representation and self-representation function in this context? In what ways has this changed in the contemporary labour market, and since the birth of the digital age? New ways of working and doing business are on the rise and they are accompanied by new professions and identities. Through a range of critical reflections, spanning fashion, design, art, architecture and advertising, the authors examine both traditional and pioneering roles in creative industries over time and across geographies, from the fashion mannequin-maker and pop stylist to the digital-age blogger, the craft maker and design curator. Arguing that professional identities are continually in a state of fashioning, through style, taste, gender and representation on the cultural stage, case studies highlight moments of friction and flux in the construction of creative labour in the global economy. Interweaving critical perspectives from fashion and design history with sociology and cultural theory, this book addresses a burgeoning area of research that is essential reading as we enter a new terrain in fashion and the creative industries.