“Blood, Sweat and Shears”: Happiness, Creativity, and Fashion Education

From the late 1990s, ideas about creativity and the creative economy have become increasingly important in education and economic development discourse. On the one hand, creative practice is said to enhance individual, social, and economic well-being, on the other, critics have labeled creative workers as a new “precariat.” This article explores how happiness might coexist with the risky, precarious employment common in creative enterprises such as fashion. It draws on interviews with fashion design students to examine creativity as a mode of regulation, as a fantasmatic logic, and as an embodied performance. The article shows how fashion design education in New Zealand affectively binds students to creativity, arguing that as “creative girls,” they become highly productive performers in the cultural economy.