The Crossroad between Production and Consumption

The perspective of this essay is grounded in sociology of culture and relies on the idea of material culture and its objects as a magnifying glass to better understand the immaterial values rooted in the whole society. We are especially referring to the works of Paul Hirsch and Wendy Griswold. The former, analysing the media industry, has developed an interpretative model – known as Hirsch’s scheme – that breaks up the cultural industry in four phases (design, production, communication, and consumption), whilst the latter has proposed a ‘cultural diamond’ to underline how cultural meanings are the result of a relationship between a social world, a creator (individual or collective), a receiver, and a cultural object. Within an institutional view of fashion – in other words, by analysing fashion as a ‘social field’ – both approaches will be applied to fashion to describe it as being a cultural industry and to affirm the perpetual connection between material contents and immaterial values in this field. Starting from these premises and promoting an interdisciplinary comparison between scholars afferent to various disciplines, this contribution intends to deeply explore the concrete and material expressions of fashion that connect producers and consumers making the materiality a door to join the immaterial horizons of fashion.