14 PIERRE B O URDIEU The Field of Fashion Agnès Rocamora INTRODUCTION When in 1975 Pierre Bourdieu and Yvette Delsaut published ‘Le Couturier et sa Griffe’, an article devoted to postwar French couture, the work came in continuation with Bourdieu’s interest in analysing the consumption and pro- duction of culture. As well as his ethnography of Kabylia (Bourdieu, 2000a) the French sociologist had started interrogating everyday cultural practices such as amateur photography (1965: 17) or art gallery visits (1966). This approach was to culminate in his celebrated 1979 book Distinction, where he investigates French people’s tastes in goods such as food, fashion, music and art. Condemning the ‘hierarchy of legitimate objects of study’ (Bourdieu, 1965: 17) that, he argued, informed academic enquiry he insisted that ‘any cultural asset from cookery to dodecaphonic music by way of the Western movie, can be an object for apprehension ranging from the simple, actual sensation to scholarly appreciation’ (Bourdieu, 1993a: 220). Thus, by look- ing at objects which are less ‘noble’, or as he puts it, are seen as ‘unworthy’ (Bourdieu, 1993b: 132), such as fashion and photography, Bourdieu dis- tinguished himself from an academic ield focused on more ‘legitimate’ subjects of sociological enquiry such as the state and work, placed high in ‘the hierarchy of objects regarded as worthy or unworthy of being studied’ (Bourdieu, 1993b: 132). Although Bourdieu devoted two articles to fashion (Bourdieu and Delsaut, 1975; Bourdieu, 1993b) and discussed it in Distinction, his attention to this ield has been given comparatively less space in the many texts that engage 9781780767338_pi-303.indd 233 9781780767338_pi-303.indd 233 10/7/2015 5:45:28 PM 10/7/2015 5:45:28 PM