Yesterday we brought you back to basics by introducing the idea behind AVMoFA. Today we continue by sharing a ‘jewel’ from our AVMoFA archives: the bottle of Professional Lightweight mousse ‘Curl Collection’, provided by Giulia Mensitieri. The bottle is connected to her fieldwork of the fashion industry in Paris and Brussels – which she also shared with Allegra readers via some fieldnotes. That this topic is timely is also reflected in our recent New Publications list on #Economics – put together by our very own reviews editor Judith Beyer. Thus we’ll continue with this theme soon as reviews will be arriving on books such as Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion by Tansy Hoskins and Flip-Flop. A Journey Through Globalisation’s Backroads by Caroline Knowles. ENJOY!
In this frame you can see a specimen of the Professional Lightweight mousse “Curl Collection” I picked up among the relics of a défilée during the Paris fashion week. It was my ‘treat’ for a 15-hour-unpaid-work shift, one of many in the context of my ethnography of fashion workers in Paris and Brussels. My fieldwork was carried out with creators, designers, stylists, models, photographers, as well as other professionals involved in the sector. In my research I focused on the new forms of precarities, subjectivations and dominations produced by capitalism in the context of “immaterial” labour. This very professional and expensive cosmetics was provided for free and in huge quantity by the sponsor of the event. It was applied on models by a dozen of unpaid workers in the prestigious and luxurious venues that hosted the Paris fashion week. It was then left on the floor as garbage: a metaphor of the paradoxes and inequalities that cut across the fashion world. Too expensive for me to purchase, this artefact has finally found its real ‘home’ in the AVMoFA.
