Who Needs Cultural Intermediaries Indeed?

This paper interrogates the concept of cultural intermediaries through an analysis of the New Zealand designer fashion industry, an industry composed of small networked enterprises which offer a wide range of educational, aesthetic and business services. The authors argue that ‘cultural intermediaries’ can no longer be thought of in terms of particular occupations, spaces or events. Instead, cultural mediation is more productively understood as a function of the multiplicity of activities and relationships organised around the new economic spaces of the fashion industry, all of which are subject to the exigencies of capital accumulation. Moreover, the proliferating activities that comprise the New Zealand fashion industry are profoundly gendered, both in terms of women's numerical dominance and the gendered skills and attributes that these activities mobilise. These women are all producing, mediating and consuming fashion, making up the complex economic and cultural networks which comprise the fashion industry and also supporting the industry through their own fashion consumption and the creation of a broader fashionable sensibility. It is in this context that the authors ask ‘Who needs cultural intermediaries indeed?’