Governing and calculating everyday dress

Abstract

Drawing on Foucault's governmentality thesis, together with the insightful lens offered by Miller and Rose's seminal work "Governing Economic Life,"1 this paper suggests that the 'quick response' initiatives deployed by contemporary fashion chains to address the problem of 'fast fashion,' are illustrative examples of technologies for governing economic life. The meticulous recording and the minute surveillance regimes of the apparatus of quick response, renders the phenomenon of fast fashion knowable and administrable. Calculative technologies operate according to a normalising process that separates the fashionable from the unfashionable. Calculative practices also perpetuate the phenomenon of fast fashion by facilitating the faster flow of both product and information. In so doing, they both construct and sustain mass fashion. © Ingrid Jeacle 2012.