Making taste…what do fashion tastemakers actually do?
In my investigations into the activities of fashion tastemakers, I have looked closely at how these high-profile influencers behave.
My last post discussed how these individuals work together, collaborating to enable their new perspectives on fashion to take shape in garments, images, texts and ways of being fashionable. The fashion designers, fashion editors and journalists, stylists, photographers, models, celebrities and bloggers that form this particular group of taste shapers all come with a job title – as listed here! The job titles allow us to have a general idea of the type of work these people do; however, specific taste-making activities are not so neatly defined.
Through my investigations into what fashion tastemakers actually do, I have developed a typology of taste-making activities (image below / download pdf). The typology came about because of the need to be able to identify, order and describe the multi-tasking most fashion tastemakers undertake in the course of influencing. My research found that once individuals find success and influence in one area of activity, they are regularly required to demonstrate their expert fashionableness in other ways. For example – those who initially came to our attention for their witty blog posts find themselves taking photographs for advertising campaigns, designing fashion collection, judging reality TV shows, or styling and producing jewellery! The typology makes it possible to move beyond a job title and break down activities of influence in greater detail.
Job titles also become inadequate when studying some of the most high-profile tastemakers in fashion. For someone with the influence of designer Karl Lagerfeld, for example, labelling him purely as a fashion designer fails to acknowledge his many ways of shaping fashionable taste – e.g. creating playlists, interiors and fine art photography alongside all his other creative direction work. So the categories in the typology can be configured to create multi-hyphenate descriptors, such as Originator - Image-maker - Performer to better reflect what fashion tastemakers actually do when shaping taste. Plus, the categories can be re-ordered and re-configured to suit particular taste-making occasions, for example Kate Moss maybe influential as a selector – performer when she is putting a range together for TopShop, but a performer – image-maker in Calvin Klein perfume campaign. Taste-making activities are not neat or easily defined, but the typology of fashion taste-making activities offers a flexible structure that helps to get a clearer picture of the magic the tastemakers perform.