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Consuming the City: Public Fashion Festivals and the Participatory Economies of Urban Spaces in Melbourne, Australia

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  • Sally Weller

Abstract

This paper examines how the conduct of a local festival of fashion retailing—the L’Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival—reinvigorates the commodity fair format of older times. The paper takes a longitudinal view of the festival’s evolution and draws on Lefebvre’s spatiology, complemented by Terranova’s approach to the participatory economy, to explore how it produces monetary value as it produces space. The discussion highlights the contradictory nature of event processes, arguing that they reinforce dominant representations of the city and extend retailers’ reach into public space, but at the same time undermine spaces of business activity. The paper suggests that the event’s use of participatory economies of cultural mobilisation are similar to the tactics of social movement activism, but that in this context mobilisation works to support the value-capturing strategies of local retailers and to reinscribe urban spaces as spaces of consumption.

Suggested Citation

  • Sally Weller, 2013. "Consuming the City: Public Fashion Festivals and the Participatory Economies of Urban Spaces in Melbourne, Australia," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 50(14), pages 2853-2868, November.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:urbstu:v:50:y:2013:i:14:p:2853-2868
    DOI: 10.1177/0042098013482500
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Larry Dwyer & Peter Forsyth & Ray Spurr, 2006. "Economic Evaluations of Special Events," Chapters, in: Larry Dwyer & Peter Forsyth (ed.), International Handbook on the Economics of Tourism, chapter 15, Edward Elgar Publishing.
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    3. Nigel Thrift, 2008. "The Material Practices Of Glamour," Journal of Cultural Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 1(1), pages 9-23, March.
    4. Sally Weller, 2007. "Fashion as viscous knowledge: fashion's role in shaping trans-national garment production," Journal of Economic Geography, Oxford University Press, vol. 7(1), pages 39-66, January.
    5. Kevin Fox Gotham, 2005. "Theorizing urban spectacles," City, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 9(2), pages 225-246, July.
    6. Dominic Power & Johan Jansson, 2008. "Cyclical Clusters in Global Circuits: Overlapping Spaces in Furniture Trade Fairs," Economic Geography, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 84(4), pages 423-448, October.
    7. Jamie Peck, 2005. "Struggling with the Creative Class," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 29(4), pages 740-770, December.
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