Maureen Molloy

Globalization, cultural economy, and not-so-global cities: the New Zealand designer fashion industry

Research on so-called ‘global cities’ dominates the existing literature on globalization, fashion, and cities. In this we paper analyze the recent rise of a designer fashion industry in Auckland, New Zealand. The designer fashion industry has emerged as an unlikely success story as the New Zealand economy has globalized. Together with other creative industries, designer fashion is seen as an industry that can revamp New Zealands international image and in doing so foster additional foreign investment. As the industry has succeeded, Auckland has disproportionately benefited, with sustained industry agglomeration and increasing infrastructural development in this city. However, the symbolic benefits of the designer fashion industry have proved more elusive. We show that the New Zealand designer fashion industry borrows symbolic capital from the global cities of designer fashion. We argue that this borrowing of symbolic capital underlines the need to think more carefully about the geographical specificity of the material, political, and symbolic processes associated with globalization and the cultural economy.

Globalization, the `new economy' and working women: Theorizing from the New Zealand designer fashion industry

This paper arises out of research on the New Zealand designer fashion industry. An unexpected success story, this export-oriented industry is dominated by women as designers, employees, wholesale and public relations agents, industry officials, fashion writers and editors, in addition to women holding more traditionally gendered roles as garment workers, tastemakers and consumers. Our analysis of the gendered globalization of the New Zealand fashion industry exposes a number of disconnections between womens positions in this industry and the literatures on globalization, clothing and fashion. We argue that the New Zealand designer fashion industry not only embodies new ways of working associated with the movement of first world women into the labour force, but its very success is underpinned by these changes. Our conclusion is that more work is needed to explicate links between globalization and first world womens entry into the labour force.

WHO NEEDS CULTURAL INTERMEDIARIES INDEED

This paper interrogates the concept of cultural intermediaries through an analysis of the New Zealand designer fashion industry, an industry composed of small networked enterprises which offer a wide range of educational, aesthetic and business services. The authors argue that ‘cultural intermediaries’ can no longer be thought of in terms of particular occupations, spaces or events. Instead, cultural mediation is more productively understood as a function of the multiplicity of activities and relationships organised around the new economic spaces of the fashion industry, all of which are subject to the exigencies of capital accumulation. Moreover, the proliferating activities that comprise the New Zealand fashion industry are profoundly gendered, both in terms of womens numerical dominance and the gendered skills and attributes that these activities mobilise. These women are all producing, mediating and consuming fashion, making up the complex economic and cultural networks which comprise the fashion industry and also supporting the industry through their own fashion consumption and the creation of a broader fashionable sensibility. It is in this context that the authors ask ‘Who needs cultural intermediaries indeed?’

No Inclination To Mix With Strangers: Marriage Patterns Among Highland Scots Migrants To Cape Breton and New Zealand, 1800-1916

This article examines the structure and persistence of three large kin groups over five generations. These groups emigrated from Highland Scotland to Cape Breton, Canada, between 1800 and 1830 and subsequently to Waipu, in New Zealand, in the 1850s. They were characterised by extensive cousin and brother-sister exchange marriages, forms of marriage which, it is argued, were extant in Scotland in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Brother-sister exchange marriages re mained very common in the first and second generation New Zealand-born, but cousin marriage occurred far less frequently in these generations. However, when the marriages of groups of cousins are examined, it is found that even apparently exogamous marriages commonly contributed to the formation of new, intensely inter-related kin groups. This article concludes that extensive kin ties provided a source of material and emotional support for emigrants facing dislocation and subsequent colonization.

Poverty, Dependence and ‘Women’: Reading Autobiography and Social Policy from 1930s New Zealand

This essay explores the construction of ‘women’ in New Zealand during the 1930s, when the social legislation of the First Labour Government was being formulated and enacted. It examines the documentation produced by the legislative process in relation to the autobiographical texts of John A. Lee and Mary Isabella Lee, arguing that there are parallel conflicts in each set of texts. There is a series of double movements: the offer of the state’s protection to women is at the same moment a gesture of defence; ‘women’ are simultaneously constructed as ‘helpless’ and—not so overtly—as needing to be controlled.