Apparatus of Valuation in the Fashion Industry of Paris

Abstract

Studying the case of Paris’s fashion industry, this paper examines the apparatus of valuation and the role of agglomerations in metropolitan areas. Paris’s fashion industry is a sector in which intangible labour, such as knowledge creation, material labour involved in clothes fabrication and the networking of personal connections can be found. Furthermore, it has a complex apparatus of valuation embodied in the space of Paris: formal/informal institutions, including conventions and intermediaries; numerous commons; encounters between people; the development of social networks mediating mutual knowledge transfer; shows/salons and shops realizing the match between creators and their clients and, of course, places of interest. These heterogeneous elements, which are distributed in Paris and are assembled and arranged through the valuation of goods, function as the apparatus of valuation. In this article, I attempt to seize industrial agglomeration or the milieu as the “territorialised dispositif (apparatus) of coordination and valuation,” whereas the theory of innovative milieu understands it as a “territorialised institution/convention.”