Ms Amanda Bill
Textile designer, and lecturer in Textile Design and Visual Communication Design at Massey University College of Fine Arts, Design and Music in Wellington, New Zealand. Also have a MA(Applied) in Recreation and Leisure Studies. Currently a doctoral candidate at University of Auckland, working with an interdisciplinary team on The Fashion Project.
"Creating a label for myself": Fashion Design Subjectivity and Careers in the New Economy.
This paper examines what 'being creative' means for fashion design students in the context of a network society. Drawing on interviews with students, it explores whether creative self-expression can be regarded as a 'practice of the self' (Rose, 1990) through which young people transform themselves into employable subjects for an economy that is increasingly dependant on individualization. The paper also discusses fashion as informational content, and considers whether a cultural focus on 'idea as image' rather than as material object, might inflect the performance of creativity by prospective fashion design students. In New Zealand, the promotion of creative industries via economic and education policy has largely been constructed around naive accounts of designer fashion and creativity. Publicity has relied on glamorous catwalk images and the use of the iconic 'fashion designer' who since the late-1990s, has been represented as entrepreneurial, female, and a creative genius. These abridged representations collapse the apparel and textile industry into 'fashion design' thereby excluding participation by certain types of person, and restricting the skills available to the industry as a whole. Design school presents those aspiring to a career in fashion with a route, and an imperative, to create a label for themselves, thus rendering their life meaningful as an individual choice towards a biographical project of self-realisation.
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