Abstract
When it comes to making aesthetic decisions, people commonly account for their taste with intuition. A cultural good, symbol, or object is simply right and respondents “know it when they see it.” This article investigates the cultural meanings professional tastemakers see as they make such deliberations, while also illustrating the problems sociologists have in seeing culture. Using the case of fashion model casting and scouting, I present four methods to trace how cultural producers recognize and value models’ looks in the global fashion market, demonstrating how each method results in a different emphasis on how culture is used to acquire and deploy aesthetic sense. First, interviews capture justifications of aesthetic decisions, as well as general processes about day-to-day work routines, which are next tested with network analysis, the second method, which emphasizes structural arrangements in taste decisions. The third method, ethnography, discovers taste as a situated form of knowledge production and emphasizes culture in interaction. The fourth and related method, observant participation, sees taste as phenomenological as culture becomes embodied and tacit consciousness. Each of these methods is an optical device that renders a particular and complimentary account of taste and affords researchers a certain way to see how culture works.
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Notes
Women are the focus of this article because they receive the bulk of attention in fashion, resulting from the size of women’s fashion and the related gendered construction of women’s display value.
In a similar vein, Patrik Aspers calls these status markets, as opposed to standard markets (2009).
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Acknowledgments
My thanks to John Mohr and Amin Ghaziani for organizing the “Measuring Culture” Conference at the University of British Columbia in October 2012, and to all of the participants. Thanks to Frédéric Godart, Thomas Franssen, Terrence McDonnell, Japonica Brown-Saracino, Iddo Tavory, and Alex van Venrooij for valuable comments on previous drafts of this article.
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Mears, A. Seeing culture through the eye of the beholder: four methods in pursuit of taste. Theor Soc 43, 291–309 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-014-9217-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-014-9217-4