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Alison Goodrum, The Fashion Project,
University of Auckland
'Far From The High Fashion Crowd: The Production of Paul Smith's 'New' Female Consumer'
As communicators of cultural identity, both fashionable clothing and the global fashion brands that produce, market and sell it are important intermediaries in the construction and mobilization of 'correct' forms of femininity. This paper examines the case of the British fashion designer and retailer, Paul Smith, looking at one aspect of Smith's global business in particular: his so-called 'revolutionary' work on the wardrobes of the British female. The selling of the Paul Smith woman has come to rely on a rhetoric constructed around a 'new' form of female consumer, one desiring something different to the usual fashionable constructions of 'lycra strait-jacketed siren or high fashion junkie'. Through the example of the gendered identities produced, promoted and portrayed by the Paul Smith global enterprise, the paper examines more generally the explosion of traditional forms of femininity that have for so long inhabited the commercial arena. In so doing, it discusses and critiques the notion that new terms are being set within this arena for more nuanced portraits of a female consumer, ones in which a diversity of identities has come to be, quite literally, 'the latest fashion'.
Bio: Dr Alison Goodrum is a postdoctoral research fellow on the University of Auckland's 'Fashion Project', an interdisciplinary study of New Zealand designer fashion. Her research interests include globalisation, individualisation and national identities in fashion (both in New Zealand and the UK). Alison has had her work published in texts from Routledge and Berg.
<a.goodrum@auckland.ac.nz>