Globalization, Cultural Economy, and Not-so-global Cities: The New Zealand Designer Fashion Industry

Abstract

Research on so-called global cities dominates the exiting literature on globalization, fashion and cities. This paper analyses the recent rise of a designer fashion industry in a not-so-global city; Auckland, New Zealand. The designer fashion industry has emerged as an unlikely success story as the New Zealand economy has globalized. Together with the other creative industries, designer fashion is seen as an industry that can revamp New Zealand’s international image to one more in keeping with the values of the global market place, and in doing so foster additional foreign investment. As the industry has become more successful so too has Auckland 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 illusive. 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 raises important theoretical questions, underlining the need to think more carefully about how the material, political and symbolic processes associated with globalization and the rise of the cultural economy play themselves out in distinctive ways in particular places.