Fashion Community and Commons

As with music, fashion encompasses a large gray area between the extremes of consumers and producers. This gray area, in which creative thinkers draw upon an ever growing and constantly circulating pool of common memes, is arguably the source of new ideas and trends within the fashion industry. Sociological literature on innovation describes it as an interactive process, dependent upon cumulative knowledge and the capacity for interchange between individuals, institutions and organizations. Academic research on fashion echoes this definition. As Vincent B. Leitch writes, "innovation in fashion is less a matter of creativity ex nihilo than of mutation and pastiche. In fashion today,innovation continues to thrive as its central practices foresight, flexibility and cooperation  flourish in a fairly open and unfettered creative commons.

While fashion, like music, is a global community  fragmented, multifaceted and highly stratified  it also is tied to an industry that reaps the benefits of agglomeration economies, or the types of spatial concentration that create advantageous economic conditions, resulting in sustained or increased concentration.31 Thus, Paris has remained a central node in the global fashion economy, along with New York and Milan, and London, Tokyo and Los Angeles serve as a second tier. Designers tend to live and work in one or more of these cities, as do buyers and merchandisers, and design schools such as Parsons School of Design in New York and College of St. Martin's in London are located in these fashion centers. Of course, the actual production of most clothing, with the exception of haute couture or signature collections, is outsourced to the third world, mainly to Asian countries.
The career of most designers is a peripatetic one, moving between companies every few years. Fashion design, like entertainment, depends more and more on blockbusters. One bad collection can sink a design team. As Richard Wheeler, an accessories designer at Ann Taylor, commented, "Teams don't stay in place for more than a few years. If there is a bad season, it's always seen as the designer's fault. You fire the designer and hire a new team. This approach helps to create a community that is fairly fluid, with talent, ideas, individuals and aesthetics constantly recirculating within a relatively limited sphere.
Both music and fashion owe their existence to globalized creative communities, which thrive on the continual circulation of ideas and mining of the creative commons. Unlike technological or industrial development, in which new objects and ideas may be discovered  or invented  both music and fashion rely on innovation  the reshuffling of known elements into unique and surprising patterns  for creative advancement.Thus, in order to innovate effectively, musicians and fashion designers must operate within environments that grant them access to ideas and the permission to use them in new and creative ways. Neither community exists in a vacuum. Both function within highly structured industries that have emerged over the years to enable and exploit the fruits of creative endeavor. These industries have a constraining effect on the creative communities by continually pitting the financial, legal and structural imperatives of their own continuance against the needs of the artists themselves. Often, this means restricting access to the creative commons. In order to understand how market forces came to exert such control over music and fashion, it is useful to examine the histories of these industries.

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