these market issues. For example, Bouquillion et al. (2013) demonstrate how “the values and habitus of the art world [take over] the activities of designing and conducting industrial projects” (p. 11, author’s translation), Marti (2012b, pp. 199–210) examines the transformation of brands into museums through the study of the patrimonialization of the Haribo food brand, while Dondero (2009) analyzes from a semiotic point of view the sacred in the photographic image. The scientific literature in the information and communication sciences (ICS), semiotics or sociology provides many different but semantically convergent notions that allow us to understand these hybridization and transformation processes: culturization (Bouquillion et al. 2013), culturalization (Marti 2014, pp. 57–66), artification (Heinich and Shapiro 2012), artistication (Rastier 2013) and artialization (Lipovetsky and Serroy 2013). These notions testify to the transformation processes affecting the products or the processes of their communicational staging. They make it possible to grasp market pretensions and their legitimization processes (Boltanski and Chiapello 1999). As the examples cited above, which come from the fashion industry’s communication strategies, they can be approached as a process of culturalization or artification. What is of great interest in these examples, however, is not only the transformation processes taking place that affect fashion, but also the spectacular density that accompanies these processes as well as their globalizing dimension. From this perspective, a twofold research problem emerges. It concerns both the meaning of the commercial spectacle as produced by the fashion industry and the political aim included in this globalizing program that integrates different common areas such as the political, artistic, cultural, sacred and religious. The commercial spectacle thus allows this industry to increase its economic and symbolic power.
I.2. The spectacular potential of the fashion industry
Fashion shows, advertising films and images, short films, “making of”, museum exhibitions, boutiques, private parties but with the right amount of media coverage, Websites and sociodigital networks, fashion and beauty editorials supported by the magazine press are some of the strategies participating directly or indirectly in the promotion of the fashion industry.
In addition, there is an entire sublimation process of the players in this industry, such as artistic directors of fashion brands, models, muses and celebrities from the entertainment industry. These strategies and actors are integrated into particularly spectacular stagings. Fashion and its entire industry is a spectacle that I propose to address here by following Guy Debord, for whom the spectacle “is not a set of images but a social relationship between people, mediated by images” (Debord 1987, p. 4, author’s translation). The images produced by the fashion industry, its actors and its events, themselves constructed as images relayed and mediated by allied industries such as the media industries, bear witness in a very spectacular way to this social relationship that the fashion industry proposes, even imposes. Its particularity is to densify this social relation-spectacle and make it particularly captive.
I.2.1. Luxury fashion
This book therefore deals with the spectacularization of the fashion industry, a spectacularization that is both economic and symbolic. More precisely, the study proposed here focuses on so-called luxury fashion13, a segment chosen for two reasons that seem to me to be complementary: that of its economic influence and that of its communication strategies. Both – economy and communication – are subject to processes of spectacularization, whether it is a question of economic data or images of esthetics calculated down to the smallest detail.
Starting from the principle that spectacularization is the “process that makes spectacular not only any art, but also any other socio-semiotic field” (Tore 2011, author’s translation), it seems relevant to consider as spectacular both the economic performance of luxury fashion and its communication performance. In June 2019, the Bloomberg Billionnaires ranking introduced in third place Bernard Arnault, CEO of the luxury group LVMH, with a personal fortune estimated at 100.4 billion dollars. In the same ranking, we also noted the names of François Pinault, of the luxury group Kering, with a personal fortune of 37.1 billion dollars, as well as the Wertheimer brothers, owners among others of Chanel, whose personal fortune is estimated at 26.7 billion dollars14. These figures represent a spectacular performance, since they are extraordinary and attract a certain amount of media interest. By advertising them, the luxury fashion industry introduces into media the space information that unfolds the spectacular potential of its economy, a potential that is transformed into a particularly media-generated event. Just as the communication strategies of this same sector, whose aim goes beyond the promotional dimension and which mobilize the spectacle for political purposes: if the spectacle in its primary, archaic form has both a communicative and political dimension15, it is supposed to lead to a life form that relates to being together. It is to this end that luxury fashion seems to use the spectacle, in order to create something common and to position itself within a project with collective, political pretensions.
The commercial luxury fashion industry has developed a particularly dense potential for spectacularization, which could be described as mediagenic (Marion 1997, pp. 61–88). This potential for spectacularization is also linked to the close relationship that the industry in question has with art and in particular the contemporary art market, which is also highly spectacular. By “fostering closer ties between famous artists and branded objects treated as unique pieces of artisanal origin (for example, Hermès bags or Vuitton luggage)” (Boltanski and Esquerre 2017, p. 33, author’s translation), the luxury fashion industry is doubling its spectacular staging.
Entertainment shapes this industry, its goods, its actors and its discourse. Thus, this spectacular capacity aims to depict the fashion industry not so much as a creative industry with a commercial vocation, but, on the one hand, as a leisure industry, the spectacle being conceived here as a process of entertainment for the general public, and, on the other hand, as a media industry of “general interest” (Tremblay 2007, p. 216) and occupying in particular the public sphere, its “economic-social formation, its schedule” (Debord 1987, p. 13, author’s translation).
I.2.2. A collective spectacle of reflexivity
The spectacular potential of the fashion industry16 lies particularly in its “managerial creativity” (Barrère and Santagata 2005), a process of establishing “a new relationship between creation, production and distribution [and] leading to a new creation and management complex” (Barrère and Santagata 2005, p. 96, author’s translation), of which many actors are part. If, as Frédéric Godart reminds us, “the work of the fashion designer exists only because there is an economic and industrial activity that is deployed to enable the production of clothing” (Godart 2016, p. 76, author’s translation), this same activity can also promote the latter through communication strategies. Fashion is a spectacle not only because what it produces – its goods – can be spectacular, it is spectacular because of the way in which its goods are promoted based in particular on a spectacular process of collective reflexivity (Mouratidou 2012, pp. 11–21): whether they are haute couture workers, ready-to-wear design studios, make-up artists, hairdressers, stylists, models, photographers, directors, fashion journalists, art directors, group presidents, decorators, architects, muses, trainees, assistants of assistants, etc., they are all part of the collective reflexivity process, the fashion industry stages and spectacularizes many trade bodies that could represent it. However, what I will focus on throughout this book is not so much the fashion industry’s representation processes as its re-presentation policies.
I.3. From representation to re-presentation policies
“Representing means presenting oneself as representing something” (Marin 1994, p. 343, author’s translation). Representation is both presentation, that is “the very act of presenting that constructs the identity of what
