Fashion Design - Star System

Star System

Designers work within a hierarchical system.

"The designers are most stratified in the French system of fashion Fashion ensures the functioning of a system of dominant and subordinate positions within a social order. Fashion is ideological in that it is also part of the process in which particular social groups, in this case elite designers, establish, sustain and reproduce positions of power and relations of dominance and subordination. The positions of dominance and subordination appear natural and legitimate, not only to those in positions of dominance, but also to those in subordinate positions. Fashion and the medium of fashion, that is clothing, offer means to make inequalities of socioeconomic status appear legitimate, and, therefore, acceptable."

A "mythical conception of a designer as a 'creative genius' disconnected from social conditions" is central for the working of the fashion system and for the reproduction of fashion as ideology. Creativity is socially constructed and not an innate given, i.e. many may be gifted but no one can become a famous designer without being legitimized by the fashion system and its gatekeepers.

The star system is as essential for the fashion industry as for any Culture industry. "Genre and the star system are attempts to produce something analogous to brand names in cultural industries. Stars are indispensable because it is part of the ideology of creativity that creative works must have an identifiable author."