Fashion as Viscous Knowledge: Fashion's Role in Shaping Transnational Garment Production

Weller, Sally Anne (2007) Fashion as Viscous Knowledge: Fashion's Role in Shaping Transnational Garment Production. Journal of Economic Geography, 7 (1). pp. 39-66. ISSN 1468-2702

Abstract

This article develops a perspective of fashion as a complex, multi-dimensional form of knowledge and as a technology of garment mass production. It identifies the various modalities of fashion knowledge and characterises their different rates and extents of transmission across space and time in terms of their relative complexity. The article explores the spatio–temporal configurations of fashion knowledge as it is mobilised in the economy, interrogating the ways in which the uneven viscosity of its different modalities vary with their positioning in geographical space and in relation to other modalities. It then assesses the economic implications of fashion's place-specific re-combinations. These interactions are demonstrated by an examination of the impacts of international fashion trends on fashion garment supplies to the Australian market. The perspective outlined in this article highlights the inadequacies of the tacit–codified binaries that have dominated geographies of knowledge and shows why the transmission of fashion ideas consolidates rather than diminishes the power of key sites of expert knowledge

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Item type Article
URI https://vuir.vu.edu.au/id/eprint/3438
DOI 10.1093/jeg/lbl015
Official URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jeg/lbl015
Subjects Historical > Faculty/School/Research Centre/Department > Centre for Strategic Economic Studies (CSES)
Historical > FOR Classification > 1401 Economic Theory
Historical > SEO Classification > 9199 Other Economic Framework
Keywords ResPubID13802. fashion industry, fashion knowledge, trans-national garment production
Citations in Scopus 73 - View on Scopus
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