From artist to curator, couturier to fashion blogger, 'creative' professional identities can be viewed as social practices, enacted, performed and negotiated through the media, the public, and industry. Fashioning Professionals addresses what it means to be a creative professional, historically and in the digital age, as new ways of working and doing business have given rise to new professional identities. Bringing together critical reflections from international researchers, the book spans fashion, design, art, architecture, and advertising. It examines both traditional and emergent roles in creative industries, from advertising executives and surrealist artists to mannequin designers, pop stylists, bloggers, makers and design curators. The book reveals how professional identities are continually in a state of fashioning, through style, taste, gender and cultural representation, highlighting moments of friction and flux in the creative labour of the global economy. Interweaving critical perspectives from fashion and design history with sociology and cultural theory, Fashioning Professionals addresses a burgeoning area of research as we enter new terrain in fashion and the creative industries.

List of IllustrationsList of ContributorsForewordAcknowledgementsIntroduction: Fashioning Professionals: History, Theory and MethodLeah Armstrong and Felice McDowell I. Inventing1. Media in the Museum: Fashioning the Design Curator at the Boilerhouse Gallery, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Liz Farrelly2. Fashioning Pop: Stylists, Fashion Work and Popular Music Imagery, Rachel Lifter3. The Labor of Fashion Blogging, Agnès Rocamora II. Negotiating4. Fashioning Professional Identity in the British Advertising Industry: The Women's Advertising Club of London, 1923-1939: 95-114, Philippa Haughton5. Satirical Representations of the Bauhaus Architect in Simplicissimus Magazine: 115-133, Isabel Rousset6. The Self as an Art-Work: Performative Self-Representation in the Life and Work of Leonor Fini: 134-155, Andrea KollnitzIII. Making7. Designer Unknown: Documenting the Mannequin Maker, June Rowe8. Fashioning the Contemporary Artist: The Spatial Biography of Sue Tompkins, Caroline Stevenson9. The Maker 2.0: A Craft-Based Approach to Understanding a New Creative Identity, Catharine RossiIndex