The Style Engine: Spectacle, Identity, Design, and Business: How the Fashion Industry Uses Style to Create Wealth

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Summary: THE PUBLISHER'S CATALOGUE PRESENTS THE BOOK AS FOLLOWS
Review: "Why brilliant fashion designers, a notoriously non-analytic breed, sometimes succeed in anticipating the shape of things to come better than professional predictors, is one of the most obscure questions in history; and, for the historian of culture, one of the most central." Eric Hobsbawm The Style Engine is an unprecedented survey of the culture of fashion and the fashion industry -- from the products and objects themselves (clothes, accessories, etc.) to the immaterial, ephemeral, shifting meaning outside of the products (the interdependence between the fashion world and mass media, the cult of the fashion designer, symbolic story-telling as seen on the runway and in magazines). This sophisticated social and cultural study of fashion is splendidly illustrate with images by the most celebrated photographers and narrated by a multifaceted group of international experts -- cultural anthropologists, journalists, academics, designers --- examining the allure and mystery of fashion from different viewpoints. "Fashion and Entertainment, Image and Media" takes a look at mass media and shows how fashion has influenced pop music, movies, television, photography, and advertising. "Fashion, Identity, and Society" demonstrates how fashion is a social phenomenon and cultural industry comparable to the entertainment, news, and information industries. "Industry/Economics" explains the process itself, from threads to textiles to finished product. "The Methodology of Fashion Design" not only reveals the manufacturing and marketing of the designs (clothing), but also exposes the contexts in which these objects acquire value (fashion). Fashion is one of the truly international languages, speaking to individuals in every country of the world, and this fascinating book will speak to those legions of style-obsessed readers.

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Summary: METROPOLIS MAGAZINE REVIEWED THIS BOOK
Review:  The Style Engine argues that fashion isn't running on empty.by Philip NobelDesign can be defined as making something new for a reason. Designers must always differentiate between the new that is new for a reason and the new that is only new; to do otherwise risks making merely art­or worse: fashion.All design disciplines court confrontations with vagary, but only one­fashion­exists so close to its seductions that it has become a synonym for aimless flux. Considering its mandate of seasonal variation and its love of annually renewed shock tactics, it¹s easy to see why so many would lump fashion in with art­bad art­before they would consider it a design discipline, the fashion world¹s unequaled lionization of its designers notwithstanding. The Style Engine, a collection of 25 essays by writers from within and beyond the fashion industry, deploys strong arguments to fight this dismissive view of fashion. It attempts to fill in fashion¹s overlooked back story so that it can be considered as the equal of its more sober design siblings.The book, and an exhibition by the same name that hung in Florence last winter, are the first projects of the Fashion Engineering Unit (FEU), a new, self-consciously intellectual institution that bills itself ³an observatory on the economics of creativity and the intelligence of style.² Funding for the group comes from Pitti Immagine, the commercial concern responsible for organizing the important menswear shows that bring over 25,000 rag traders to Florence twice each year.Historically, writing about fashion has been high and low. The FEU is looking for the middle way. It is telling that in The Style Engine critiques of fashion by Baudrillard, Benjamin, and McCluhan are discussed (with varying degrees of justification) alongside breathless promotions by Vreeland, Mirabella, and Wintour. Between the extremes of academic writing and hemline notes in the popular press, the FEU is trying to promote a culture of criticism around fashion that will bare its economic motivations and effects, its mass media aspirations, and the substructure of craft and industry on which it rests.As a vehicle for this redemptive mission, the book works very well. It¹s divided into four sections­roughly covering media, image, techniques, and money­which plot the terrain on which the FEU plans to develop its ³fashion culture.² Of these four categories, ideas concerning the economics of the fashion industry may be the best developed; lucid arguments spill out of the final chapter (³Fashion, Business, and Industry²) and pepper many of the preceding texts. In his introduction to the first section, ³Fashion, Spectacle and Media,² Giannino Malossi, the editor of the book, curator of the exhibition, and director of the FEU, establishes The Style Engine¹s delightfully frank approach to fashion¹s slow dance with commerce: ³Every fashion originates as an industrial product and, at the same time, as a form of mass communications, and every media phenomenon is the potential prelude to a fashion and that fashion points to a series of products for mass consumption.² Bridging economic discussions and the examination of fashion as a cultural medium, several authors rely on the versatile idea of added value. The concept is introduced in understated terms by Mario Boselli, president of Pitti Immagine­³[Fashion] is on the cutting edge in terms of capacity to create added value, not only through the processing of raw materials but also through the development and creation of immaterial contents²­and expanded elaborately in John Durrell¹s essay, ³The Value of Style: Dismantling and Assessing The Style Engine.² Durrell, an international management consultant specializing in pricing strategy, finds the value style adds by analyzing the relative financial returns of popular brand names; here, glamour is at last measured in real market terms.The same clear-eyed spirit also pervades the excellent essay by Nadine Frey, ³Mass Media and Runway Presentations,² which opens the book. After a thoroughly enjoyable lampoon of runway theatrics, Frey explains how the evolution of the fashion show from decorous practicality to raucous display was fueled by the increasingly insular nature of the events themselves. In the 1970s, ³fashion designers . . . began conceiving fashion shows that were more about concept than clothes, shouting their message so loud that it could be heard over the heads of the inevitably interpreting buyers and press.² Another irreverent essay­perhaps the best in the book­is Valerie Steele¹s ³Why People Hate Fashion.² Steele, chief curator of the museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology and editor of a quarterly called Fashion Theory, addresses The Style Engine¹s most critical question with an elegant formal tour de force, introducing each paragraph with a contentious statement­³Fashion is an irrational form of female fetishism² or ³Fashion is capitalism¹s favorite child²­and wrapping it all up with a subversive epiphany: ³It is precisely the artificiality and pointlessness of fashion that makes it valuable as an esthetic fantasy.²I¹ll just ape the first part of Steele¹s technique: Fashion expresses itself as a cloying heap of pretentious images. Along these lines, The Style Engine¹s relationship to the fashion world it attempts to revise is troubled. As Frey¹s essay­and the editorial decision to place it first­make clear, one adversary here is the face fashion makes for itself. To achieve the critique it aspires to, the FEU and its authors must help us to see beyond the too well-known culture of airs, ointments, and emaciation that hides the profundity they are trying to tease out. The discussion of fashion in the context of commerce is a way to distance this project from the strong images that we inevitably bring to the book. Unfortunately, any progress made toward new visions is quickly undone. Most of the book is generously illustrated with images of the most contemptible superficiality­soft light, high cheekbones, fashion as you know and hate it. The front of the book even mimics a fashion magazine¹s advertising emporium; one flips through seven full-bleed photo spreads before finding the table of contents. You half expect the book to offer up sample perfume.This might be the intention of the designer; the images might be rhetorical­intended to confront the reader with normative visions of the spectacle of fashion­or ironic. But for those at any remove from authentic fashion images, it is too easy to see in the random photography reasons to revert to the impression that fashion is just a trifling soup of desire, art without reason, not really design.