Ann-Marie Sellerberg: Sociology of Fashion

Lecture notes from October 8, 2007

Ann-Marie Sellerberg is a sociology teacher in Lund University. She concentrates on the difference what people buy and consider as beautiful. These things differ because of the income, social position, class etc. She says that it is not possible to have a statical picture of all that, fashion is always in change. She has written the pieces such as "Konsumptionens sociology" (Consumption Sociology) and "Avständ och attraktiv - om modets växlingar" (Resistance and attraction - about fashion change). She brings out, like many other scholars, that fashion in general is not about clothes.

See more: Thorstein Veblen 1899, Georg Simmel 1904, Herbert Blumer

While Veblen and Simmel represent the old opinion of social hirarchy, social distance and class then Blumer fights for anti-hierarchy, new belonging and fashion-collective terms. Blumer says that there are social requirements for fashion, it is like a right for day. For instance, the elite use fashion as a tool to differ to make a difference and to distance theirselves. In turn, the mass tries to follow up, to become more similar to the elite and elite in turn again tries to make a difference again, to go further. The elite won't stop... they make this (fashion)difference based on the contemporary social rules, the expression-style of the present time.

Then Ann-Marie said that in fashion we can clearly distinguish two schools, which I unfortunatelly missed, but further Yunija Kawamura explains the idea maybe even better, so I will skip that part at the moment.

Anyhow, fashion is to do with cultural capital. We could analyse it from Bourdieu's perspective for instance. We can do fashion consumption research. We could study fashion as a collective action or reaction. Or we can of course speak about fashion not within clothing but for instance, food, design, art, politics, economics, where so ever I guess. There is fashion within fashion too - for example, in the fashion of interieur design we can distinguish the fashion of living room, bathroom and so on.

Consuming habits - what clothes we wear, what interieur design we prefer... - all that is to become different or the opposite, to become similar with or towards something.
People look into the future, the wait for the future. People are interested in what is about to come, begin, the freshness, the newness, the change. Therefore exists this fashion-time - we expect the new. And we have our own expectations about things that are about to come based on our own experience and reception of the world.

There is infra-structure inside of fashion, so there also must be different management-classes being taught how to manage fashion, how to market fashion. Fashion in the same time is individual and collective.