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The "couturier" and his "signature" : contribution to a theory of magic The field of luxury goods production in which high fashion has its place, is structured around the opposition between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, between consecrated art and avant-garde art. Because of this opposition, high fashion presents a functional similarity to the structure of fractions (and secondarily, age groups) of the dominating class which predisposes it to keep ahead of the expectations of its clientele : the "young", "inexpensive", "modern", "franck", "intellectual" style is in contrast with the "luxurious", "traditional", "conservative", "bourgeois" style. The succession of a couturier poses problems permitting analysis of the sort of social alchemy realized by the couturier when he imposes his "signature", which can radically modify the social quality of a product without changing its physical nature. The field of fashion betrays with particular transparency certain of the mechanisms characteristic of what can be called an economy of symbolic exchanges. What is described as the crisis of haute couture could be only one sign among others of a restructuring of this mechanism, linked to the apparition of new tokens of distinction (and of new fractions), less naively ostentatious and less insolently luxurious than those couturiers traditionally offered.
Bourdıeu et al. (Wed,) studied this question.