Alan McKinlay

Newcastle University
On behalf of The Enterprise of Culture teams at Newcastle University Business School and Heriot-Watt University: Ewan Knox, Robert MacIntosh, Alan McKinlay and Andrew MacLaren

Alan McKinlay at Newcastle University is an expert on work practices in twentieth-century European and American industry. He has published eight books, including an edited volume on Creative Labour: Working in the Creative Industries (2009). This skilled theoretician has used the work of Michel Foucault to analyze corporate strategy and industrial relations in the automobile, communications, and computer industries. His interdisciplinary research has appeared in history journals and management journals such as International Review of Social History, Industrial Relations Journal, Le Mouvement Social, Labor History Review, and International Journal of Human Resource Management. His recent work has focused on two areas: the history and contemporary experience of employers‘ organizations, and the role of industrial psychology in contemporary management practice. Scholarly expertise of this type has rarely, if ever, been applied to the study of the fashion business.

Working closely with the ‘Enterprise of Culture’ team based at Heriot-Watt University and Dr Ewan Knox at Newcastle, Professor McKinlay’s research focuses on the idea of translation in the contemporary fashion business, developing case studies of George Davies, the designer-retailer who headed the NEXT chain in the 1980s and later launched the Per Una brand for Marks and Spencer, and of Mosaic, one of the leading global consumer classification systems.

Abstract

Fashioning Brands: Bourdieu, Biba and Beyond, c. 1960-80.  

For almost fifty years British fashion designers have been at the forefront of defining and redefining Britishness. While cultural and social historians have produced important research about mass consumption and popular identities, business history has largely neglected these areas. In part, business history’s neglect of fashion reflects the dominance of manufacturing and management and, perhaps, a reluctance to engage with an industry in which value was intangible and management highly personalised; and the limited archival sources about specific firms. Design history has also neglected the importance of the brand to mid-twentieth century designers.

In this talk, we draw on a diverse range of primary sources, including extensive interviews with designers, financiers and intellectual property lawyers. Individuals and companies, Mary Quant, John Stephens, Paul Smith, and Barbara Hulanicki’s Biba were central figures in the emergence of a distinctively modern British fashion design. All shared important features in their entrepreneurial careers and business strategies: all, with the exception of Paul Smith, were graduates of art schools that placed equal importance on designing, making and commercialising clothes; all had to move into retailing; all had to construct an identifiable brand. Each of these designers was attempting to define a new market niche, a space somewhere between haute couture and mass market. High end fashion was rejected as too narrow while the mass market was considered too conservative. Fashioning a brand involved the development of specific design philosophy and of a specific consumer. The brand was designed into the very fabric of the ready-to-wear fashion.

Where developing a brand was central to Hulanicki’s Biba from the outset, for others, such as Mary Quant, branding emerged only when the founder confronted issues of financing and large-scale distribution. Equally, extending the scale of operations – or product diversification - was dependent upon how robust the brand was or whether the integrity of the design philosophy would be eroded. Theoretically, this talk will draw upon Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of cultural and economic capital. The transformation of cultural capital into economic capital has been widely examined in economic sociology and business history. However, existing studies rely on a comparison of static snap-shots to demonstrate that some sort of social and economic transubstantiation has taken place. There is little sense of the strategies and mechanisms that allow this process to take place; or, alternatively, erode both cultural and economic capital. Here, we demonstrate that through deliberate and emergent strategies, branding was the mechanism that transformed relatively restricted forms of cultural capital into economic capital.