In The Most Beautiful Job in the World, anthropologist Giulia Mensitieri takes us “Behind the Scenes of the Fashion Industry,” to expose a shocking paradox: workers in the most prestigious and sought-after jobs in the multi-billion-dollar French fashion industry often make minimum wage, if they get paid at all. How can this paradox—the greater the prestige the lower the pay—be sustained? How can the fashion industry get away with overworking and underpaying the very people who make this business so extraordinarily lucrative? The answers Mensitieri offers in this vividly detailed ethnography are complex and sobering. They are complex because they involve forms of seduction, subjugation, and subjectivation in which workers are themselves complicit. They are sobering because they are not limited to the fashion industry but are at play across the “creative” industries, including the worlds of non-profit work and higher education [267].
The fashion industry goes out of its way to promote itself and its workers as exceptional and unique—in French, le plus beau of le plus beau métier du monde can mean “the best” or “the most beautiful.” But the truth, Mensitieri argues, is that the fashion industry is not some outlier or exception, but sits at the very center of contemporary, neoliberal, globalized capitalism [13]. The industry’s normalization of precarity as the “small price to pay” for getting to do “meaningful, creative work” [21-22] and follow one’s passion is, Mensitieri argues, pushing back against the work of Richard Florida and others, the great con at the heart of all “creative” or “immaterial” labor—labor that is held up in contemporary capitalism as the new ideal. The fashion industry becomes a lens or case study through which to explore the complex and sometimes subtle mechanisms of competitivity, precarity, and subjectivity at work in creative industries, and to explore the personal and interpersonal pressures they place on workers.
Creative industries, like the fashion industry, exert their subtle forms of control, Mensitieri argues, through the process of “individualization”—the internalization on the part of workers of notions of freedom, flexibility, and exceptionalism, but also of responsibility. According to this logic, it is not the hierarchies, power imbalances, and asymmetrical reward mechanisms at the heart of the system that are responsible for a person’s success or failure in the industry. Rather, it is the responsibility of the individual as a free-market entrepreneur of his own talents, subjectivity, affect, self-image, and self-representation to accept the “rules of the game” and learn to play by them [172]. This means buying into the idea that following one’s passion and making money are not necessarily compatible, except for the lucky few who somehow hit the “jackpot” and manage to combine the two [130]. The number of people who actually achieve this goal is statistically tiny, and yet the fact that a few do manage to achieve it holds out hope for the rest that one day their big break will come.
When she began the research for her doctoral thesis in social anthropology and ethnology at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), out of which this book grows, Giulia Mensitieri was an outsider to the world of fashion. Through a mutual friend, she came to meet, and then interview and shadow, a woman she calls Mia, a freelance stylist whose job was to coordinate fashion shoots and small runway shows. Aspects of Mia’s story are illustrated and corroborated in this book through the experiences related by dozens and dozens of workers in the fashion industry who comprise the geographically mobile “cosmopolitan élite” of this rather “closed” and “mysterious” milieu to which few ever gain access [91]. Mia’s experience in the fashion industry provides a useful through-line for the book, although many of Mensitieri’s excursions into the world of fashion occur outside of Mia’s immediate orbit. The final section of the book, for example, is based on Mensitieri’s experience working as an unpaid intern for an up-and-coming Belgian designer in the weeks leading up to Paris Fashion Week. This internship represents the only period of sustained immersion during Mensitieri’s four years of fieldwork. The other experiences documented took place over one or two days, after which Mensitieri returned to her normal life [220].
At times Mensitieri’s book reads like a revised doctoral thesis (which it is) and at others like a page-turning work of tell-all investigative journalism. Mensitieri performs due diligence at every stage to provide ample references and attribution for the concepts and social theory used to support her arguments. This scholarly apparatus will doubtless be of great value to students and specialists in anthropology and sociology, but it is not always strictly necessary for the general reader, since Mensitieri does an excellent job of building her case directly from the interview material and field notes she cites. Mensitieri does not name her informants and admits to mixing and changing elements of their physical appearances or geographical locations in order to protect their identities. There is no appendix to give us the hard numbers behind her investigation, but the qualitative evidence she presents and its corroboration from multiple sources, including works of journalism and documentary film, lend solidity to her claims and suggest that her sample, while small, can be considered as representative. Mensitieri cites her informants extensively and allows them, at key moments of her argument, to tell their stories in their own words. Through this interview material, Mensitieri paints a striking portrait of working conditions for young creatives in the lofty spheres of high fashion. What emerges is a demystification, if not to say a condemnation, of the fashion industry, though Mensitieiri says that her intention was not to “denounce, but to observe, to describe, to understand, and to analyze” [23].
Across ten chapters, distributed in three broad sections, Mensitieri “deconstructs” what she calls the “dream” produced by the fashion industry—a dream of “beauty, creativity, prestige, and power” [258]. The dream is manufactured and sold on a global scale by “fashion empires” such as LVMH, owner of such luxury brands as Fendi, Givenchy, Marc Jacobs, Dior, and Louis Vuitton. The dream seduces consumers of fashion but also its producers. These producers are the “image makers” whose job it is to make sure that fashion designers’ creations look good, not just on bodies, but also on computer screens, in magazines, and on billboards [10]. They are stylists, designers, photographers, photo re-touchers, lighting assistants, set designers, makeup artists, hair stylists, manicurists, freelance consultants, sales reps, and interns. Their labor goes into creating and selling the images of beauty, elegance, refinement, and distinction associated with high fashion, haute couture, and luxury ready-to-wear brands.
In the first section of the book, Mensitieri analyses in detail what she calls the “dream-producing system” of fashion, opening with examples from her shadowing of Mia. Mensitieri is an excellent storyteller, and her book is full of memorable observations that illustrate the many tensions and contradictions at the heart of the fashion industry. Chapter 1 kicks off with one of the many stark contrasts that make Mensitieri’s examples so vivid. We are introduced to two top-models at a fashion shoot. One is wearing medical compression socks and a flesh-colored thong, from which a tampon string is visible. The other, “fragile and sick looking,” has dark circles under her eyes, slightly yellow teeth, and thinning hair [34]. We then see these models dressed, made up, coiffed, and placed in front of lights, reflectors, and fans, assuming poses that range from the awkward to the elegant to the downright pornographic. And, as if by magic, they are transformed. Suddenly, the “medicalized” becomes magnificent; the “sickly” becomes “sublime” [35]. No sooner is the “dream” constructed, however, than Mensitieri “deconstructs” it for us, moving from the models, who will not eat the food provided on set, to a harried intern who has run out to buy salad for the models and is in the men’s restroom washing lettuce from a nearby grocery store. Behind the dream of transformation and effortless luxury that consumers seek when they flip through magazines and browse in department stores, lie hundreds of such unsavory scenes, harsh realities of a daily grind that is, for the “glamour” workers [Wissinger] who live it, anything but glamourous.
In Chapter 2, Mensitieri takes us from the world of high fashion into the even more rarefied milieu of haute couture. This time we are on the set of a photo shoot for an Emirati women’s magazine. Here, the jarring contrast comes from the buffet on set. Elegant, hand-crafted pastries on one end of the buffet lie largely untouched. After the pastries come cans of Diet Coke, salads with no salad dressing and, at the end, blister-packs of Ibuprofen and Paracetamol from which people have generously served themselves. The pastries are there to sign-post prestige and luxury, Mensitieri explains, the caffeine and painkillers to get exhausted bodies and minds through grueling work days. The magazine’s editor-in-chief, whose handbag alone costs €8,000, will end up paying Mia €250 for this 14-hour photo shoot and the prep work leading up to it.
As Mensitieri explains in Chapter 3 on fashion and the unequal access to globalization it supports, the European fashion industry is doing everything in its power to preserve and project its “symbolic power” to a new class of “world elites,” like the Emirati magazine readers targeted by the haute couture fashion shoot. Mensitieri maps out the “imaginary cartographies of luxury” underpinning marketing practices in the industry [75]. To do so, she uses among other examples that of the “Made in China” label, a dreaded and stigmatizing label in the world of high fashion. As a marketing agent for a top-of-the-line French fashion brand explains, an item with the prestigious “made in Italy” or “made in France” label might actually be made in China. If a part of the garment worth thirty percent or more of the final price is manufactured in Italy or France, it can be labeled that way, even if the rest of the garment is manufactured in China by Chinese workers. Labels ultimately tell us less about the actual geographical provenance of an item than about the “imagination” they represent: one of “luxury in the case of Italy or France [...] and of its opposite in the case of the majority of other countries in the world” [75].
In the next section, Mensitieri develops the metaphor of “overexposure” to describe the ways in which the attractiveness of the dream of fashion is amplified in the media spotlight while the reality of the work is kept hidden in the shadows. This section is inspired by the recurrent attitude expressed by Mensitieri’s informants that they feel “lucky” to have a job in fashion, despite exhausting hours, despotic bosses, and real economic and social precarity. “The structural inequality of this industry is not described by fashion workers in terms of injustice or exploitation,” Mensitieri explains, “but in terms of luck and risk” [135]. Throughout this section Mensitieri explores the ways in which the fashion industry’s cultivation of opacity, on the one hand, and the rhetoric of luck, on the other, operate at the level of individual careers, using the examples of salespeople (Chapter 4), models (Chapter 5), and stylists (Mia in Chapter 6 and a man she calls Thierry, Karl Lagerfeld’s ex right-hand man, in Chapter 7).
Mensitieri offers us a new paradigm of exploitation in fashion—beyond that of sweatshops and child labor with which we are already familiar. She shows us up-and-coming designers living on unemployment benefits and models who actually pay to be in runway shows and take on so much unpaid work that they end up in debt to their agents. She shows us a marketing agent who admits to eating McDonald’s take-out in the five-star hotel room paid for by his employer because he cannot afford a meal in a restaurant.
The lived reality of the jet-setting self-proclaimed “star” Mia, follows a similar logic. Mensitieri takes us into the one-bedroom Parisian apartment Mia shares with a mutual friend, an apartment in disarray because Mia, whose work takes her to luxury hotels in places like Milan, Singapore, Hong Kong, London, and New York, barely has time to light down between jobs—that is, when she is getting jobs. In the living room, which doubles as Mia’s bedroom, Mensitieri observes a suitcase out of which spill expensive garments—the fashions to be showcased in Mia’s next shoot. They lie on the floor beside a pair of shoes, some dirty laundry, and a shopping bag. On the kitchenette counter, a discarded yogurt bottle occupies the same visual space as a Prada bracelet.
We learn that, like many fashion workers, Mia is often paid in “perks” or discounts, instead of cash. At one point, when she is complaining about not having the stable salary needed to rent a decent apartment, Mia flings that particular week’s earnings—a €2,500 handbag—down on the table. For the job in question, Mia was paid with a €5,000 merchandise voucher. For another job, her compensation takes the form of an instore discount. The discount will not pay her overdue phone bill, but it will get her a pair of designer shoes that will later grab the attention of a potential employer during an interview. Through “perks” and “extra-monetary” compensation, employers offer workers “symbolic capital” in lieu of “economic capital.”
Fashion workers, like other consumers of high fashion, want to own their little “piece of the dream,” even if (or especially because) they cannot afford the lifestyle that goes with it [110]. Indeed, this is how luxury brands make their money. Little “pieces of the dream” like accessories, handbags, perfumes, and cosmetics add up to large profits for fashion houses, which lose money on haute couture clothing but gain publicity through the brand’s highly mediatized exposure at runway shows.
Wearing luxury brands gives fashion workers credibility in the field, but it does not put food on the table. For that, workers have to juggle the risks and benefits of having jobs on the side—jobs outside of the prestigious sphere of “artistic” fashion work. One worker gives English lessons, while others, like Mia, take on “commercial work,” the least prestigious form of fashion work and the most penalizing to one’s career.
The mechanisms of exploitation and self-exploitation at the heart of the creative work done by people like Mia remains carefully hidden by the industry, but also by the very people it exploits. Fashion workers hide their precarity behind symbols of prosperity, and their exhaustion and frustration behind a “cool” or laid-back attitude on the job. There are no standard salaries for different job categories and levels of experience in fashion. Compensation information is kept carefully hidden, which means that workers are at a disadvantage in negotiating a reasonable salary or fee for their work. Meanwhile, workers often sign confidentiality clauses that apply not just to the work they do—the designs and images they create—but also to the unfavorable (if not to say downright illegal) conditions in which they perform that work.
The “illusion of a homogenous world wherein all [fashion workers] have access to luxury,” Mensitieri argues, hides these deeply ingrained “structural inequalities” [145]. As one worker puts it, in the fashion industry “the money is there, but it is poorly distributed. It’s always in the same hands” [146]. These inequalities are, Mensitieri argues, “[depoliticized]” through the rhetoric of luck, which “individualizes” them, placing them “at the level of individuals and their personal trajectories,” rather than at a structural or systemic level [135].
In the last section of the book, Mensitieri uses her immersion experience as an intern for a young designer to explore the psychological acrobatics workers perform to hide their economic precarity and project the appropriate affect and attitude on the job. She shares insight into the ways in which workers’ “emotions and affects play a central role in the production and maintenance of hierarchies” in the fashion industry [220]. Drawing on work by Foucault, Bourdieu, Goffman, and others, Mensitieri examines the ways in which “subjectivities” are “[constructed]” by the industry and performed by its workers, even to the point of alienation.
Mensitieri points to the posturing, mask-wearing, and inflated self-presentation that are required to assert one’s status and dignity within this oppressive and hierarchical system. Each worker must know his or her place. Rigid but unspoken protocols govern interpersonal dynamics in fashion. These protocols determine who can be on a first-name basis or use the informal “tu” form, who can be openly expressive and assertive, who must be discreet and deferential, and who can expect to be completely ignored. Mia, for example, tells people that Mensitieri is writing a book about her and cultivates a “prima donna” or “drama queen” persona. This persona does not, however, correspond to the persona she brings to casual, private, off-duty interactions with people who are not from the fashion milieu. The harsh reality that the case of Mia demonstrates is that you can have decades of experience and be highly sought-after and respected but still not have attained (and perhaps never attain) “financial and existential stability” no matter how “special” you are [258]. Workers either manage to cope within the fashion industry, despite its pressures, or, as is the case with most of Mensitieri’s informants, eventually are forced to leave the profession in an effort to restore some balance to their lives.
So why do workers stay in the fashion industry as long as they do? Mensitieri suggests that they are too invested in the “dream” of fashion and the social status it confers to walk away. Their self-image and affect are on the line, in particular the notion they harbor of themselves as exceptional and either not cut out for—or too special, unique, or creative for—a “normal” nine-to-five salaried job, which they perceive as stifling of creativity. They soon learn that the “flexibility” of creative work simply gives them the “stressful freedom” to work all the time, without the benefits, compensation, and social protections associated with the nine-to-five job [257]. And yet, fashion workers remain seduced by the false sense of freedom, autonomy, and flexibility the industry cultivates, and they buy into the entrepreneurial model of individual risk taking, responsibility, and competition upon which the system is built. They are resigned to the “inequalities and domination of this milieu,” and approach these in a “spirit of competition” and not of cooperation, solidarity, or collective action [246].
Mensitieri concludes her study with a dire warning. The internal paradoxes and power dynamics of the fashion industry are not only “representative of [other] forms of work today,” she warns, but also “prophetic, in [their] excesses, of forms of work to come” [270]. Mensitieri sees the fashion industry as indicative of a much wider “major anthropological transformation that sees work no longer as a source of economic capital, but as the element that gives meaning to life” [261]. The concomitant erasure of any boundary between work life and personal life is, Mensitieri suggests, following philosopher Brian Holmes, a form that alienation will increasingly take in the 21st century [262]. Mensitieri concludes by arguing that fashion workers will not improve their working conditions until they wake up from the “dream of fashion” and find a way to do what the system is designed to prevent them from doing: cooperate, instead of competing with one another.
