Creating aesthetic, institutional and symbolic boundaries in fashion photo shoots

This study proposes a ‘bottom-up’, micro-sociological analysis of cultural production. Drawing on detailed observations of fashion photo shoots and interviews with fashion professionals in the Netherlands, we analyse how the division between ‘high’ (editorial) and ‘low’ (commercial) culture is produced in the fashion field. Our ethnographic analysis complements structuralist or institutionalist approaches like Bourdieu’s field theory, that assume an almost mechanical reproduction of field structure. Combining insights from existing ethnographies of fashion photography, with interaction ritual theory, and symbolic interactionism, we looked at a unique instance of cultural co-creation – the fashion photo shoot – to investigate how field structure and social practice come together in ‘doing aesthetics’. A step-by-step analysis of the ‘ingredients’ of a photo shoot, from finance, props and set to the model’s poses and the photographer’s style shows how the symbolically charged boundary between high and low fashion is made in concrete, embodied interactions, where it manifests itself simultaneously as institutional divide, aesthetic system and symbolic boundary. People producing fashion images experience structures and institutions as practical, aesthetic or institutional constraints and routines that provide both a conceptual framework and room for negotiation. Thus, during aesthetic interactions, people reproduce and produce boundaries, standards and conventions.