"A powerful exposé of Parisian haute couture" - Book of the Week, Times Higher Education

Fashion is one of the most powerful industries in the world, accounting for 6% of global consumption and growing steadily. Since the 1980s and the birth of the neoliberal economy, it has emerged as the glittering face of capitalism, bringing together prestige, power and beauty and occupying a central place in media and consumer fantasies. Yet the fashion industry, which claims to offer highly desirable job opportunities, relies significantly on job instability, not just in outsourced garment production but at the very heart of its creative production of luxury.

Based on an in-depth investigation involving stylists, models, designers, hairdressers, make-up artists, photographers and interns, anthropologist Giulia Mensitieri goes behind fashion's glamorous facade to explore the lived realities of working in the industry. This challenging book lays bare the working conditions of 'the most beautiful job in the world,' showing that exploitation isn't confined to sweatshops abroad or sexual harassment of models, but exists at the very heart of the powerful symbolic and economic centre of fashion.

Giulia Mensitieri has a doctorate in social anthropology and ethnology from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, France. Her research focuses on globalisation, the transformations of work, and the coveted imaginary worlds produced by contemporary capitalism.

Preface
Fashion and the dream

Introduction

Part I: Fashion and Capitalism: a system for producing the dream

1. Fabricating desire: press and advertising
2. Haute couture, the apotheosis of the dream
3. The circulation of the dream: fashion and globalization

Part II: Working in Fashion or "lucky to be there"

4. On the threshold of the dream: the salespeople
5. The greater the prestige, the lower the pay: the rules of the game for fashion workers
6. Prestige and precariousness: symbolic and material geographies
7. At the heart of the dream: the designer-stylists

Part III: The dream and those who work in it

8. At work with an up-and-coming fashion designer
9. Knowing how to "be there": work relationships
10. Getting into fashion, creating a persona, coping in fashion, getting out of fashion

Conclusion