Fashion as viscous knowledge: fashion's role in shaping trans-national garment production

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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