Fashioning founders: Dress and gender in the entrepreneurial ecosystem

Abstract

Abstract This article considers how entrepreneurs' fashion themselves as founders. Based on ethnographic research conducted in Australia, we discuss whether the informal dress codes of the startup world neutralize gender differences. Our findings suggest that informal dress codes reinforce the normative positionality of men as archetypal entrepreneurial actors. They reinscribe gendered hierarchies that affect the everyday entrepreneurial experience, and extend distinctly different allowances for nonconformity and unconventionality to men and women. Founders attempt to inhabit these gendered inequalities, performing a kind of esthetic labor that mobilizes their appearances to play into as well as counter the gendered expectations of the ecosystem and extract value from their personal and professional fashioning.

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