(PDF) Creative Mass. Consumption Creativity and Innovation on Bangkok's Fashion Markets.

The becoming productive of consumer culture has been an important theme for social research. Within neoliberal discourse, the link between consumer culture and new forms of immaterial production has been conceptualized as “creativity.” This paper uses the experience of Bangkok’s fashion markets to begin to articulate an alternative understanding of the relation between consumer culture and immater- ial production, a different kind of “creativity.” We suggest that Bangkok’s fashion markets manifest a kind of creativity where innovation is highly socialized, as opposed to being oriented around the notion of individual genius and individual intellectual property; where participation is popular as opposed to elite-based and where the ambiguous relation between creation and commercial success that is intrinsic to Western notions of creativity is replaced by an embrace of markets and commerce as vehicles for self-expression. Bangkok’s fashion markets represent an example of a market-based commons centered innovation economy.

This art icle was downloaded by: [ Universit a Cat t olica del Sacro Cuore] On: 21 March 2015, At : 01: 33 Publisher: Rout ledge I nform a Lt d Regist ered in England and Wales Regist ered Num ber: 1072954 Regist ered office: Mort im er House, 37- 41 Mort im er St reet , London W1T 3JH, UK Consumption Markets & Culture Publicat ion det ails, including inst ruct ions f or aut hors and subscript ion inf ormat ion: ht t p: / / www. t andf online. com/ loi/ gcmc20 Creative mass. Consumption, creativity and innovation on Bangkok's fashion markets a Adam Arvidsson & Bert ram Niessen a a Depart ment of Social and Polit ical Sciences, Universit y of Milano, It aly Published online: 14 Apr 2014. Click for updates To cite this article: Adam Arvidsson & Bert ram Niessen (2015) Creat ive mass. 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Consumption, creativity and innovation on Bangkok’s fashion markets ∗ Adam Arvidsson and Bertram Niessen Downloaded by [Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore] at 01:33 21 March 2015 Department of Social and Political Sciences, University of Milano, Italy The becoming productive of consumer culture has been an important theme for social research. Within neoliberal discourse, the link between consumer culture and new forms of immaterial production has been conceptualized as “creativity.” This paper uses the experience of Bangkok’s fashion markets to begin to articulate an alternative understanding of the relation between consumer culture and immaterial production, a different kind of “creativity.” We suggest that Bangkok’s fashion markets manifest a kind of creativity where innovation is highly socialized, as opposed to being oriented around the notion of individual genius and individual intellectual property; where participation is popular as opposed to elite-based and where the ambiguous relation between creation and commercial success that is intrinsic to Western notions of creativity is replaced by an embrace of markets and commerce as vehicles for self-expression. Bangkok’s fashion markets represent an example of a market-based commons centered innovation economy. Keywords: creativity; consumer agency; media culture; fashion; Asia; markets; innovation 1. Introduction In the last decade the terms “creativity,” “creative class” and “creative industries” have affirmed themselves in academic and policy discourses across the world. To some extent, the discourse on “creativity” has served to motivate urban requalification strategies that have, in turn, fueled booming real-estate markets in countries like the UK, the USA, Sweden and Denmark (see Pike 2011). The discourse on creativity has also provided ways to govern and valorize the new productive potential that has emerged from the consumerist remediation of social relations in the post-war years, effectively including this new resource within the value flows of corporate capitalism (Currid 2007; Lloyd 2006). Creativity, Jamie Peck suggests, has become an integral part of a neoliberal regime of governance, whereby a new productive potential of the social is rendered compatible with the needs on the part of a new phase of capitalist accumulation based on socialized production on the one hand and the accumulation of intangible assets on the other (Peck 2010, 195, ff.). In this neoliberal version of creativity, the outcomes of broader networks of collaborative socialized production are positioned as the efforts of a professional creative class dedicated to entrepreneurial self-realization, and common ∗ Corresponding author. Email: adam.arvidsson@unimi.it # 2014 Taylor & Francis Downloaded by [Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore] at 01:33 21 March 2015 112 A. Arvidsson and B. Niessen symbolic resources are transformed into tradable property rights, attributable to individual genius and inner “talent” (cf. Gershon 2011). The neoliberal embrace of “creativity” has been a response to a new productive potential of mediatized social relations. In recent decades, global media culture, mass fashion, cheap technologies for the registration and reproduction of music and film, like cassettes, VCR and later DVDs and MP3s, and, of course, the Internet have transformed the classical arrangement between producers and consumers that marked the “culture industries” of modernity (Hesmondhalgh 2010). A growing range of people now participate actively in the co-production of music, film and other forms of content, as well as the fashions, fads and lifestyles that underpin brand values (Marion and Nairn 2011; McQuarrie, Miller, and Phillips 2013). Global marketing has contributed to develop consumer competences for co-production (Cova and Cova 2012) and the distinction between consumption and production has, in some cases, been blurred (Zwick, Bonsu, and Darmody 2008). The last 20 years have witnessed a boom in similar processes of consumerist mediation outside of modernity’s Western “mainland,” as economic growth, urbanization and global media culture have spread across the globe. For example, in his study of the transformations of Delhi’s cityscape in the 1980s and 1990s, Ravi Sundaram shows how the spread of cheap technologies for music reproduction has expanded a “middle-class modernity” based on consumer culture into a general feature of the soundscape of the city. Combined with a tight network of small traders in pirated CDs, DVDs and counterfeit branded consumer goods, along with recycled computers and mobile phones, this has created a “new topography of urbanism” that has “linked media markets, parallel production centers and neighborhoods” into an alternative “pirate modernity” (Sundaram 2010, 88 –92). Similarly, in Nigeria informal networks of an alternative street-level consumer culture have formed the distributional infrastructure for the Nollywood film industry (Larkin 2004), and in Indonesia computers and design software have supported a boom in street-level “indie fashion” (Heryanto 2008; Luvaas 2010). In particular, scholars have pointed at the consolidation of subaltern networks of “globalization from below” (Mathews, Ribeiro, and Vega 2012) where counterfeit copies of Western-designed consumer goods along with their more or less creative modifications, as in the case of Chinese Shan-zhai mobile phones (Lin 2011), serve to provide access to the goods and “Superlogograms” (Chang 2004) of global modernity also to those who cannot afford the originals. Globalization from below has grown in parallel to and sometimes in competition with the hegemonic global culture centered on Western brands and Western-style corporate modernity (cf. Davis and Monk 2007). The growing literature on “pirate modernity” or “globalization from below” has been extremely useful in describing the consolidation of the “world’s other economy” of pirated or counterfeited goods, and its consequences in transforming the life-world of those excluded from globalization’s official “space of flows.” However, this literature has paid little attention to the innovative or “creative” potential of such alternative networks of consumerist remediation. Pirate modernity, “Shan-zhai culture” or globalization from below has mainly been understood as poorer and more popular versions of “the real thing.” However, at the end of the value chain, recent phenomena such as the boom of innovative youth cultures all across Southeast Asia have resulted in products such as Psy’s Gangnam Style beating Justin Bieber as the most popular YouTube video (on the complicated institutional arrangements behind K-pop). The creativity of Chinese Shan-zhai mobile phone producers – creating among other things the Obama phone, a Downloaded by [Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore] at 01:33 21 March 2015 Consumption Markets & Culture 113 Blackberry clone that became all the rage in Kenya during the 2008 US presidential elections (Hu 2008) – and the arrival of countries like Indonesia, Korea and Thailand on the international fashion and design circuit suggest that some elements of creativity do originate from what Mathews and Ribeiro call “the world’s other economy.” In other words, it would seem that the networks of street markets, informal vendors and counterfeited products that make up globalization from below are not only about counterfeiting, but also to some extent about innovation \and “creativity” – in some pristine sense of that term. (This has recently been acknowledged by the managerial literature, where concepts like Jugaad – or “frugal” – innovation have become the rage, Radjou, Prabhu, and Ahuja 2012.) In this article, we will present a case study of such an alternative creative scene: Bangkok’s unofficial fashion system. Centered around the city’s vibrant night markets, and involving young middle-class designers as well small-scale traders in counterfeits and wholesale garments, the Bangkok fashion system exhibits a way of organizing innovation that is quite different from that described by the neoliberal paradigm of “creativity.” We will describe its features through a qualitative study, and investigate how the fashion markets contrast with the official doctrine of creative development in fashion supported by Thai government bodes like the Thailand Creative Design Center (TCDC). Our purpose is not primarily to outline an alternative “Asian model of creativity” (à la Wittfogel 1957) or even a “Bangkok model” but to put the “naturalness” of the dominant neoliberal model of creativity into discussion. The question that we have set out to discuss is: what does creativity look like when viewed from Bangkok’s fashion markets (rather than from Austin Texas or Hoxton, London)? What can this different point of view teach us about alternative ways of thinking of consumer culture and “creativity” in the East as well as in the West? Indeed, we believe that such a reversal of perspective is timely and necessary as the neoliberal model of creativity has itself faced mounting criticism in academic and, to some extent, policy circles in recent years. A number of empirical studies have problematized its core assumptions like the empirical relevance of the concept of a “creative class” (Peck 2010); the ability of this class, to the extent that it exists, to bring about jobs and economic development (Oakley 2004) and the notion that creative industries build on individual (rather than common and shared) talent and ideas (Arvidsson 2007; Dyer-Witheford 2010). Others have pointed at the unjust, precarious or even exploitative productive relations that often prevail within the creative industries and that official narratives of creativity and self-realization tend to obscure (Arvidsson, Malossi, and Naro 2010; Christopherson 2008; Ross 2009, for overviews see Gill and Pratt 2008; Hesmondhalgh 2010). 2. Creativity in Asia and in the West During the 2000s, the neoliberal notions of creativity have been imported to several Asian countries. In China for example, creativity and creative industries have allegedly been transformed into a “super-sign” “invested with almost super natural powers to transform and vitalize” Chinese society and to find solutions to a wide range of problems, from intellectual property to industrial pollution (Keane 2007, 99). In Singapore, the government has gone to great lengths to promote an urban ambience suitable to the lifestyle of the global “creative class,” through gentrification strategies and motions toward greater tolerance of “gay” or “bohemian” lifestyles (Yue 2006). In India, New Delhi has been promoted as a “creative city” where Downloaded by [Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore] at 01:33 21 March 2015 114 A. Arvidsson and B. Niessen investments in art and culture accompany the growth of a high-tech information economy (Sundaram 2010). In Thailand, the promotion of creativity has centered on fashion and design. (Indeed in a recent coffee table book presentation of young Asian fashion designers, 9 of the 40 designers featured were Thai, making Thailand second only to Japan in terms of fashion talent, Daab 2008). This has been organized through a number of government initiatives (like the Bangkok Fashion Week) and organizations (like, chiefly the TCDC, which has organized events and seminars since 2005 and which features a wellequipped resource center in Bangkok). Mostly, these initiatives have been steeped in a familiar neoliberal model where “creativity” has been understood to refer to “inner talent,” located within the minds of particularly gifted individuals who belong to a “creative class.” These initiatives have been inscribed within the equally familiar narrative of a linear progression from an “industrial economy dominated by large organizations” via a “knowledge economy” where “the rules of the game changed and revenue creation shifted from the physical to the virtual” to a “creative economy [where] the human mind is where goods and services are created [and where] ideas and intellectual property have become important articles of trade” (TCDC 2008, for overviews see also Flew and Cunningham 2010; Hui 2007; Kong and O’Connor 2009; Ysuf and Nabeshima 2005). In order to put this neoliberal version of creativity in a wider perspective, we need first to examine its origins. Present notions of creativity and creative industries have a fairly clear and well-known history. The concept of “creative industries” entered into policy discourse in the late 1990s as the UK New Labour government sought new ways to promote and govern rapidly developing sectors of the UK (or mostly London) economy, like arts, music, fashion and Internet-related services like communication and web design. The concepts of “creative cities” and “creative class” emerged at about the same time through the writings of Charles Landry (2000) in the UK and Richard Florida (2002) in the USA, and they owed their success principally to the suggestion that unstructured forms of urban sociality (like the “bohemia”) could be governed and deployed in ways that would promote both economic development and the valorization of real-estate markets (Lloyd 2006; Seymour 2004). What unites these concepts is that, at a policy level, they have all served as ways to conceptualize, understand, promote and govern new forms of socialized wealth creation that move outside of established organizations and institutions, and that have grown increasingly central to economic accumulation, not just in the established “culture industries” but within several sectors of the information economy more generally. By labeling this phenomenon “creativity,” central dimensions of a contemporary participatory culture – whether this be user innovation of video games, consumer co-production of street fashion or “cool,” or the unpaid creation of music styles or an urban ambience amendable to gentrification – can be related to discourses of economic and business policy, and thus positioned as a resource that can be governed. In this way, discourses of creativity have served to reposition the ongoing innovation of new esthetic styles and forms of life, the new forms of “social and linguistic innovation” (Melucci 1996) that has been a feature of Western cities since at least the 1960s, from a problematic source of disturbance to a resource to be built and capitalized on. It is true that such forms of socialized innovation are no new phenomenon. Reflexivity, consumer agency and various forms of social and esthetic innovation have been an inherent feature of human sociality throughout history. Contemporary rhetoric often to the contrary; such “creativity” has by no means been ignored by the “culture Downloaded by [Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore] at 01:33 21 March 2015 Consumption Markets & Culture 115 industries” not even in their Fordist, industrial incarnation (cf. Hesmondhalgh 2010). This said, both the socialization of wealth creation and the increasing relevance of forms of socialized wealth creation to capital accumulation (and hence the growing need to govern such processes) are linked to core structural developments in the information economy. A growing incidence of what Melucci calls “social and linguistic innovation” can be related to two key tendencies of Western post-War development. First, the combined outcome of economic growth, higher levels of education and the diffusion of consumer culture has been a kind of generational “Buddenbroks effect” whereby the children of the middle class tend to increasingly privilege self-realization and “creativity” over material accumulation. In the West, this tendency has been visible since the late 1960s, and many of the social movements of the late 1960s and 1970s can be read as expressions of such new post-materialist values. Discourses on creativity (together with the emphasis on meaning and self-realization within the managerial literature on knowledge work) have constituted a sometimes successful attempt to align such a post-materialist value structure with the realities and requirements of the capitalist production process (cf. Boltanski and Chiapello 1999). Second, the growth of consumer culture and the concomitant mediatization of social relations have significantly increased the stock of symbolic and cognitive resources at the disposition of an average member of society. Music, lifestyles, pop culture, art and clothing from all over the world now have become part of a global commons that can be appropriated and re-contextualized as part of new and innovative cultural forms. Together, these resources serve as a global symbolic commons, which can be drawn on by individuals in a wide variety of contexts and positions. Alongside this growth in the commonly available cultural stock, there has also been a steady decline in the cost of the necessary means of cultural production. These developments have culminated in the spread of the computers with Internet access that combines access to a vast repository of information and cultural forms with cheap and generally available tools for music, film and text editing and publishing as well as with social media, community and personal brand building. Together, these two developments – the growing wealth of a global symbolic commons and the spread of technologies that facilitate the execution and organization of cultural production – have given rise to a condition of what Paolo Virno (2004) calls “mass intellectuality,” where reflexive innovation and symbolic elaboration becomes a default condition of social life. Finally, the growing strength of socialized innovation processes together with the ease with which such productivity can be located and appropriated in a digital environment has promoted a corporate interest in positioning consumers and other members of the public as sources of esthetic innovation (Zwick, Bonsu, and Darmody 2008). The business of the “creative industries” has, to no small extent, been to connect such corporate demand for brandable content to emerging socialized innovation processes (cf. Arvidsson 2011). In the West, the rise of participatory consumerism endowed with an ethic of esthetic innovation and personal self-realization can be roughly located in the 1960s and 1970s; the declining cost of the means of cultural production in the 1980s and 1990s; and corporate interest in appropriating the fruits of a participatory culture in the 2000s (although there are of course antecedents in these respects). In Asia, the chronology is somewhat different. Although Japan has had a flourishing series of extremely creative youth cultures beginning sometime in the 1970s (Mori 2009) and although the corporate capitalization on “Japanese Cool,” principally in the play industries, Downloaded by [Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore] at 01:33 21 March 2015 116 A. Arvidsson and B. Niessen and in hip-hop dates back to the 1990s (Allison 2009; Condry 2001), other Asian countries have taken longer to arrive at this. Consequently, Asian pop culture remained dominated by Japan (together with Hong Kong films) throughout the 1980s. It is only in the 1990s that media liberalization and popular access to “pirated” counterfeit cultural commodities like music cassettes, CDs and, later, DVDs, increasing economic prosperity and the habituation to consumer culture begin to drive the emergence of similarly innovative youth cultures in China (with the spread of the dakuo youth culture, cf. De Kloet 2005), Korea and Thailand. In Korea, the government together with large chaebol-owned music, film industries and large brands like LG and Samsung embarked on a policy to promote and export culture as a new source of national wealth, leading to a Korean Wave, or Hanryo, of films, pop, fashions and consumer brands hitting Asian markets in the 2000s (Hong and Kim 2013; Shim 2006). In Thailand, the development of a more productive and innovative consumer culture can similarly be located in the 1990s, as that decade saw rising economic prosperity and the concomitant growth in the importance of consumer culture. Thai economic development picked up in the 1980s with the liberalization of trade and the pursuit of a strategy of export-oriented growth. In particular, the decade between 1987 and 1997 saw massive economic growth driven by labor-intensive exports like textiles and outsourced manufacturing for Japanese and East Asian companies. In that period, roughly one million people moved from agriculture to industry each year, and between 1980 and 2006 GDP per capita tripled, while per capita consumption rose by 50% (both indicators dropped significantly in the immediate aftermath of the 1997 crisis, when the economy shrank by 10%, to pick up again shortly afterwards, Phongpaichit 2008). This wealth remained unequally distributed. In fact, the Thai economy has been marked by strong regional and class inequalities as long as there are available data – since the 1932 Zimmerman ([1932] 1999) survey – with Bangkok and surrounding provinces significantly wealthier than the Northern and in particular North-Eastern provinces, and with wealth concentrated with the urban middle and upper class. These income discrepancies have further increased after the 1997 crisis. In the last decade, both the urban middle class and the rural and urban working class have become better off, but at the same time the gap between the two has increased. This persistent divide in wealth distribution is a significant structural factor in Thai society. By the mid-1990s, economic growth and the concentration of wealth around Bangkok had created a relatively wealthy urban middle class with a strong appetite for consumption (which, in the post-crisis recovery continued to be fueled by cheap access to credit, driving rising levels of household debt). The children of the middle class, like their European peers in the 1960s, began to enjoy prolonged periods outside the labor market (as university enrollment doubled between 1998 and 2006). At the same time, their life-world was evermore marked by consumer culture and consumerist institutions (Jory 1999; Wattanasuwan 2003a, 2003b). The 1990s saw the rise of a number of shopping malls that soon became a focus for youth culture and youthful public space. In particular, Siam Square, a sprawling development of small shops, restaurants, bars, discotheques and Karaoke bars in close proximity to the prestigious Chulalongkorn University Campus, and across the street from the luxurious Siam Paragon Shopping Mall, became a focus for youth culture locally and- via its influence on media culture – also nationally, where regional and global inspirations could mix and match and subcultures evolve and circulate. (Several television programs would broadcast trends and fashions from Siam Square for a national audience, Vorng 2009). Downloaded by [Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore] at 01:33 21 March 2015 Consumption Markets & Culture 117 Along with Siam Square, the MBK mall, the Chatuchak (or “JJ”) weekend market and night markets like (the now defunct) Suan Lum quickly became centers for middleclass youth culture. These markets are cluttered and densely populated spaces numbering thousands of vendor stalls (tens of thousands in the case of the JJ weekend market) selling a wide variety of merchandise. Alongside the vendor stalls they feature bars, eateries and small music venues. In the last decades, these markets have harbored a growing “fashion section” made up of small design operations run by two to three mostly young designers. With the development of Bangkok as a center for the Asian indie scene, these fashion sections, with their accompanying bars and nightspots, have become central to the Thai youth cultural scene. The markets in this sense are not only commercial, but also cultural spaces. Along with university campuses (that often, as in the case of Chulalongkorn University, also harbored markets for t-shirts, music, DVDs and cheap fashions) they provided a place to check out new kinds of street style; watch new subcultural “tribes” (like the Korea tribes that invaded Bangkok and caused something of a moral panic in the early 2000s); and watch brake dancing, hip-hop performances and other forms of street art (Siriyuvasak and Hyunhoon 2007). In fact, it is striking how Thai middle-class youth subculture effortlessly and almost exclusively plays out in commercial spaces like shopping malls and markets, and how the city has very little in terms of both non-commercial (or “underground”) cultural venues and youthful subcultures that cultivate anti-establishment attitudes (Cornwell-Smith 2013). In short, the compatibility between consumer culture and subcultural innovation seems to be almost total. At the same time, the productivity of such subcultural innovation increased massively during the 2000s as the city became more cosmopolitan, harboring increasing flows of youth tourism (concentrated in the neighborhood of Kao San Road that has also become a nightlife center for Thai middle-class youth), as the Korean wave intensified the flows and diversity of cultural products, and as the spread of information and communication technologies greatly reduced the costs of cultural production and distribution. (In his work on the Bangkok Heavy Metal scene, for example, Athip Jittarerk shows how between 2000 and 2010 the costs of producing an album declined tenfold and during the same time the number of bands increased four- to five-fold, Jittarerk 2011). At this time, the city became a hub for Asian indie music, which mostly played out in commercial spaces or within the framework of heavily commercialized music festivals (often sponsored by brands, Sawangchot 2009). There was a parallel boom in street fashion with the indie music scene. 3. Methods This study is part of an ongoing project of comparative analysis of “creative scenes” in different cities (Arvidsson 2007; Arvidsson, Malossi, and Naro 2010). Within this project, we have developed a methodology that highlights a limited number of distinct features of the scenes that we have studied (essentially the social background of participants, prevailing business practices, strategies for earning a livelihood, the nature of cooperation and competition, attitudes to intellectual property and the relation between commercial success and peer-standing or reputation as main motivations). These dimensions of analysis are grounded in our previous studies, and they give us a limited yet clear avenue for a comparative analysis of the Bangkok case. The aim of our research is not an in-depth description in the classic ethnographic sense of that term. Downloaded by [Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore] at 01:33 21 March 2015 118 A. Arvidsson and B. Niessen Our data were gathered in an intense three-week period of fieldwork in Bangkok, conducted by a team of three researchers and two interpreters in July 2010. Our data consist of field notes from participant observations of the fashion and textile markets of Chatuchak, Siam Square, the Sum Luam night bazaar and Pratunam, in-depth interviews of about two hours each with eight designer operations (numbering two to three designers each), a survey of fashion designers operating at the Chatuchak weekend market with 186 respondents, five expert interviews and three workshops with designers, design students, garment worker activists, academics and experts conducted at Chulalongkorn University and the Rangsit University design school. The designer operations that we interviewed were all active on the Sum Luam or JJ weekend market. We contacted them through our participant observation of the market and subsequently conducted interviews of about one hour each, in their market stalls or when possible in a nearby coffee shop. In six out of eight cases we used interpreters. Subsequently, we distributed a short (17 questions) survey to 200 design operations on the JJ market. The questions addressed individual design operations collectively (and not individual designers) and the survey was translated into Thai. We defined a “designer operation” as a market vendor selling merchandise that was also designed by the people running the stall, and not simply re-sold or imported in bulk from China, and where there would be an element of self-conscious identity, such as, mostly, a brand. Most of our designers sold clothes, but bags and footwear were also represented in our sample. We excluded jewelry designers. Overall response rates were high. Only 14 respondents declined to answer the survey, and most respondents answered most questions, with the exception of questions on where people worked in their parallel careers (84 people declined to answer) and, predictably given the statusconscious context, how many partners to a particular design operation had a university degree (25 respondents declined to answer that question). In our data gathering and analysis we followed a grounded approach (Glaser and Strauss 1967) that consistently involved local experts and activists in the ongoing research design (in ways similar to strategies of action research). At the end of each field work day, our research team discussed results and elaborated further questions and hypotheses in a two-hour meeting. These “hints” were subsequently explored the following day. Our research overall proceeded in this order: an initial round of participant observation at the markets generated questions to be followed up in interviews. Results from interviews were discussed in workshops with designers, academics and local experts, and collectively transformed into questions for subsequent interviews and survey questions. Interviews were not recorded, as this would be sensitive and given our frequent use of translators, not very useful; instead, we took notes. Similarly, survey results were interpreted in workshops involving local experts, and the new questions thus generated followed up in a further round of interviews. A first version of this paper was written during a second visit to Bangkok in the summer of 2011, after presenting the results at three academic events and discussing results once more with seven local experts and designers in informal conversations. Evidently, our study leaves many questions unanswered. For example, we have not been able to deal with the level of material production of fashion garments and its relation to the design process. Nor have we been able to engage in multi-sited ethnographies to explore the situation of Bangkok’s fashion markets within broader networks of “globalization from below”. We recognize those limits and see them as challenges for further research. As we will suggest in the conclusion, this study has allowed us Consumption Markets & Culture 119 Downloaded by [Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore] at 01:33 21 March 2015 to have a first comparative look at Bangkok’s fashion markets and to pose a number of grounded questions for such further research. 4. The fashion markets Beginning in the late 1990s, Bangkok saw a proliferation of young designers peddling their wares in its sprawling markets, first in the gigantic JJ weekend market where a section devoted to design and fashion gradually evolved in the garment section, then in other spaces like Suan Lum night Bazar and Siam Square. These small-scale designers probably number in the thousands (we identified 400 designer operations present just in the JJ market in 2010), were staffed by people in their 20s and 30s (our survey indicated an average age of 29), were predominately female (70%) and often university educated (56% had a university degree). They produce small series of rapidly shifting fashion collections for a large number of active consumers who tend to buy new garments every week, and with whom they interact closely and share a common cultural universe. The number of designers present suggests that fashion design is a popular option for exercising creativity among Thai middle-class youth. This is supported by the boom in applications to the growing number of fashion and design programs at universities in Bangkok. It is also confirmed by our interviewees, many of whom cited the popularity of fashion as a pursuit, and the ease with which designing and crafting clothes suggested itself as a venue of creativity – “everybody wants to be a designer” as one of our interviewees, the proprietor of a successful brand of women’s clothing operating on the JJ Weekend market put it. Indeed, in our interviews and workshops it was commonly suggested that the “fashion scene” had boomed in the last decade. The popularity of fashion design has a number of causes. First, there is probably some truth to statements about a “traditional” (to use an imprecise term) attention to surface, style and esthetics in Thai culture (Van Esterik 2000). Our interviewees often stressed this opinion. Many claimed that “Thai people” have a natural penchant for design and fashion given the inherent esthetic sensibility of Thai culture. Whatever the merit of such emic explanations, inherent and presumably timeless cultural traits are not the only explanation for the recent boom in fashion; it can also be linked to the particularities of the Thai modernization process. The extremely status-conscious nature of Thai society, combined with rapid urbanization and the re-composition of status groups, has led to a generalized status anxiety, at least for the middle class, where it becomes very important to mark off a proper façade in interpersonal encounters, so that issues of status allocation can be immediately settled (Vorng 2011a, 2011b). Consumer goods such as clothes as well as particularly branded items serve this purpose, and even young people from disadvantaged backgrounds put in considerable effort to mark off a stylish façade (Mahoney 2010; Wattanasuwan 2003a). It is not infrequent among middle-class consumers to buy new clothes every week in order to maintain a quickly changing and fashion-conscious appearance (Chancharoensuk 2008). The market designers cater to this demand by supplying fashionable yet cheap and generally low- to middlequality garments that are intended to be worn a couple of times and then thrown away. Middle-class consumers complement this “fast fashion” with substantial investments in expensive Western branded gods – a Prada bag, a pair of Gucci sunglasses, what is known as “furniture” – that provide them with something of an entry ticket to high-so public spaces (like the Emporium or Siam Paragon Shopping malls), and that Downloaded by [Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore] at 01:33 21 March 2015 120 A. Arvidsson and B. Niessen can subsequently be resold or traded in at the many luxury goods exchanges that populate Siam Square (Vorng 2009). However, two additional conditions are more closely related to the economic crisis of 1997. First, increased competition from China and Vietnam led to massive layoffs with the decline of the textile industry in the wake of the crisis. Many laid-off textile workers set up shops at home, often working with short-term commissions for the factories where they had worked before. This return of a putting out system had a number of consequences for worker exploitation and the ability to guarantee ethical labor standards, as participants to our workshop with activists and garment workers underlined. But it also led to a proliferation of small textile workshops able to quickly produce small series of garments. The fashion designers that we interviewed claimed to mainly rely on a small number of such trusted small-scale suppliers located in Bangkok or in the suburbs, and with whom they had come into contact through friends and family (and 47% of our survey respondents used factories with less than 5 employees, 86% used factories with less than 15 employees). Typically, orders ranged in the magnitude of 30–50 pieces. This extreme flexibility of production enabled them to change the make-up of their collections every week, and breadth with the market, so to say. Second, the economic crisis led to an increase in markets and street vending. Many middle-class white-collar employees resorted to street or market vending as an alternative to unemployment. This was a relatively easy option as access to vending spaces in Bangkok’s sprawling markets is unproblematic, and as enforcements of rules and regulations concerning hawking on sidewalks or outside of regulated market spaces is comparatively lax (or at least informal; many market vendors report that they have to pay informal rent to police or local strongmen for the privilege of using a space, Walsh and Maneepong 2009). Market or street vending was also a culturally acceptable option since many of the designers that we interviewed had previous experiences of street vending in the family one or two generations ago (65% of the respondents to our survey stated that their parents had had experience with market vending). However, as in the case of Indonesian indie fashion documented by Luvaas (2010), the arrival of middle-class university-educated people into the street vending scene led to the emergence of a new kind of more sophisticated street vendors who created their own brands and used rational business methods to coordinate supplies between different market stalls in different locations. Together with a new supply of more upmarket spaces for street vending, like the fashion sections of JJ market and the night markets or spaces around the new BTS Sky train or super-elevated mass transport system, this contributed to making street vending more acceptable as a middle-class pursuit (Walsh 2010). Fashion markets like JJ are characterized by close proximity between designers and consumers. This proximity is cultural in the sense that they belong to the same age group, dress alike, listen to the same music and socialize in the many bars and eateries that line the market. Indeed the designers on JJ market that we interviewed underlined peer relations as a way into fashion. One dress designer told a typical story: I started making clothes for myself because there was nothing around that I wanted to wear. My friends liked it and began to ask me to make clothes for them too. And then I put up a stall on the market so that I could sell to my friends. She subsequently went on to claim that her market stall barely covered her operating costs but that she enjoyed being on the markets because it was a way for her to be Downloaded by [Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore] at 01:33 21 March 2015 Consumption Markets & Culture 121 seen by her friends and to make new ones. While this might be an extreme case, there is no doubt that a lot of socializing between designers and their customers takes place at the market: people chat, drink and eat together and fill in for each other in stalls. The proximity is also physical in the sense that they all share the same crammed space and move about in close proximity. In this situation, designs get copied very quickly and a successful innovation can spread through the markets in as little as a week (indeed, 79% of the designers that we surveyed claimed to be “copied often” by other designers). Copying can take two forms. One is what is generally associated with “counterfeiting”: that is an attempt to produce an identical copy of an original item and selling it as the original item. This is quite rare in relation to the products of smallscale designers (counterfeits of well-known Western brands are readily available, at JJ market, but even more so at the more tourist-oriented night markets of Patpong or Sukhumvit). Among small-scale designers, copying is more a matter of appropriating and re-elaborating certain designs or stylistic elements. This can happen in two ways. A design that originates with one designer can be incorporated in the work of another designer, executed slightly differently, with different materials or combined with other elements that originate elsewhere. Alternatively, a design idea that sells well can be reproduced by others using cheaper materials and sold at a lower cost. In both cases there is no intent to pass off the copy as the original. Rather, copying is to some extent creative and to imitate someone else, particularly in an innovative way, implies an implicit recognition of that person’s original idea. This is also how the designers see it themselves. They understand widespread copying of their work, both laterally in terms of its incorporation in the work of their designer peers and down-market in terms of its replication in cheaper materials, as something that adds to their reputation and standing within the public of peers – other designers and consumers – within which they move. Indeed, one expert at TCDC that we interviewed attributed the particular esthetic fair of Thai fashion to such a culture of creative and collaborative copying. In other words, copying is generally not practiced as counterfeiting, and it is generally not perceived as a “theft” of ideas. Instead, copying is generally creative as it consists in a re-appropriation and re-elaboration of an idea while maintaining an implicit recognition of the origins of that idea and to be copied is perceived as something that adds to one’s status: “if you are copied then it means that you are popular.” The story of the Kloset brand illustrates this. Kloset began as an operation on Siam Square in the early 2000s. Its distinct style was subsequently imitated by designers at JJ market and downright copied by vendors in the Pratunam wholesale market. However, as participants to our workshop at Rangsit design school unanimously sustained, it was the process of copying that made the brand and its designers famous and enabled them to expand nationally. Rather than an illustrating the dangers of copying, the Kloset story was viewed as a success case. This constant copying or creative appropriation of ideas – from other designers, from consumers, from pop culture in the form of European, Japanese and Korean magazines and other media products – puts strong pressure on innovation. Designers who wish to maintain their reputation and standing need to continuously innovate new products (with the hope of these too being copied along the line). It is not uncommon for the designers that we surveyed to add new items to their collection every week (60% of our sample did this). If nothing else this is necessary in order to maintain a distinct identity in the face of massive competition. Simply put, in a situation where 400 designers with their own distinct brand identities operate in intense spatial proximity, to straightforwardly copy is not a viable business strategy. While imitating the general trend, 122 A. Arvidsson and B. Niessen Downloaded by [Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore] at 01:33 21 March 2015 designers need to keep innovating if nothing else in order to set themselves off from the sellers of more generic garments who share the market with them, but whose garments retail for half the price or less. Rather, the density of social interaction that characterizes the fashion markets and the social proximity between designers, consumers and even producers mean that the fashion markets are best viewed as a system of collective innovation, where rapid stylistic innovation results from intensified flows of objects, symbols and discourses among participants. Exponents of the official fashion system sometimes clamp down on the fashion markets as instances or pure business-driven counterfeiting. As one teacher at the design program of Rangsit University said: My students worked in Chatuchak and earned like 100– 200 thousand baht a month. They just copied something from a magazine or from another designer and added a couple of details and sold it on. That is not design, that is business. The reality is more complex, not only with respect to the copying/counterfeiting part, but also with respect to the business part. In particular, the quoted earnings figure seems greatly exaggerated. Only little more than half of the designers that we surveyed lived off the business of selling and designing fashion; 45% had other jobs on the side and many stated that their earnings were just about sufficient to pay the rent for a market stall (which were substantial 25,000–35,000 baht a month at JJ market). It is also quite difficult to make substantial amounts of money at the JJ market as the oversupply of designers puts downward pressure on the prices of fashion items. Some designers reported that with constant down-market copying the value-addition that a new design could generate would shrink by 50% in the course of a week. The designers that we interviewed would consistently downplay their ability to make money from their operations and consistently stress creativity and the recognition Bangkok fashion market. Downloaded by [Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore] at 01:33 21 March 2015 Consumption Markets & Culture 123 of that creativity on the part of friends and peers as the main motivation for why they kept up their business. Common narratives were along these lines: “I’ve been doing this since I was a teenager.” “Fashion is a natural way of self-expression for me.” This might be the effect of a cultural bias against explicitly stating business success as a goal. However, at the same time, while 60% of the respondents to our survey stated “creativity” as their main motivation for engaging in fashion design, 40% of respondents to our survey did state “business success” as their main goal, suggesting that this answer was far from taboo. Overall, we did not find much of a business-oriented mentally among the designers that we interviewed. They were generally not very interested in expanding beyond the market and did not express aspirations to enter national or even international markets (see Wherry 2006 for a similar attitude among Northern Thai traditional handicraft artisans). Some did export their wares, but that happened generally through contacts that had been initiated in the JJ market and export relations were fragmented, a matter of one-to-one business relations administered generally by networks of expatriate Thais. This does not mean that the designers that we interviewed would necessarily refuse business success if the opportunity presented itself (indeed some brands grew out of the night markets to become national operations or, as in the case of the Manee shoe brand, international ones). However, it indicates that for most designers the pursuit of business success alone is not the prime motivation for their being on the market. Rather, the close integration of market life and peer sociality probably meant that the distinction between peer recognition and business success, between creativity and the market, might not have been as straightforward to them as it is, at least allegedly, to their Western peers. A similar orientation was also visible in the attitude toward brands. Most if not all designers put substantial efforts in creating a brand, designing a logo, a particular recognizable esthetic, and a growing number of designers were using the Internet and social media to publicize their brands. Often, brands would consist in a couple of English words thrown together in random fashion, like the kind of generic “brandedness” that Constantine Nakassis (2012) documents in his work on young consumers in Tamil Nadu, but generally the brand was not understood as a marketing tool. It was generally assumed that consumers of low-cost market fashions do not care much about brands. They care about the look and feel of garments that they want to recombine in a personal way, while brands are primarily important for Western luxury goods. Again this does not mean that brands were unimportant, but they were understood as vehicles for self-expression rather than marketing devices. Designers were passionate about their brands as concentrated expression of “who I am” or more commonly “who we are,” and the brand was primarily a device for making this known among peers. Again, business success and marketing combined with value horizons that derived both from the enjoyment of social interaction on the market and from a more subtle reputation economy. For some designers that we interviewed, keeping a stand at the JJ market was seen as a sideline and sometimes part-time pursuit that served primarily as a way to become visible in the evolving urban creative scene and to accumulate and advance one’s personal reputational capital, which could then be capitalized on in other pursuits. Indeed, to be a fashion designer appeared to fulfill a similar function to that of being a DJ in the “creative scenes” of European cities like Copenhagen or Berlin, where young advertising media and communication professionals sometimes do DJ-ing on the side as a way to advance their reputation in the scene (Arvidsson 2007; Niessen 2009). 124 A. Arvidsson and B. Niessen Downloaded by [Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore] at 01:33 21 March 2015 Among the fashion designers on JJ markets who had other jobs on the side, about half (or 56% of our sample) worked in advertising or communication. 5. Creative mass? In the last decades, successive Thai administrations have invested quite substantially in promoting fashion as a viable strategy of further economic development. In view of declining competitiveness and overall crisis of the textile industry, the 2001 –2006 government embarked on a number of initiatives to promote Thai fashion designers and Thai fashion brands, and to support and valorize the rediscovery of “traditional” handicrafts like textiles among rural communities in order to enable garment industries to find new forms of value addition and move up the value chain from mere material production. To date, these initiatives have met with modest economic success. If Thai fashion has to some extent succeeded symbolically, in the sense that Thai fashion designers have begun to acquire an Asian and even international reputation, this has mostly been a matter of small operations that cater to an exclusive luxury market. It is striking that the only “creative industry” that makes any significant contribution to the Thai economy is jewelry, and this is because Bangkok has traditionally been a hub for the global gem trade, rather than on account of successful government promotion of this sector (Kenan Institute Asia 2009). It is also striking how attempts to promote domestic fashion design as well as Thai creativity in general have taken the form of a more or less direct import of established neoliberal models of Western inspiration. The fashion designers who have been promoted by TCDC and other bodies, and who are showcased in official formats like the Bangkok Fashion Week, have almost all studied at famous European fashion schools, like Central St. Martin’s in London. More significantly, the ones we have interviewed nurture a conception of fashion design as an exercise of inner creativity and of themselves as “creatives” with a unique ability to invent and design – an attitude similar to that found among famous Western fashion celebrities (Bollier and Racine 2005). This is also an attitude that is taught in prestigious Thai fashion studies programs, like that of Rangsit University, where, according to the dean of the Fashion School, the pedagogical attempt is to “try to teach students to experiment on their own without copying from magazines, after that they just turn out amazing things with the creativity that comes from inside them.” This conception of creativity as stemming from the inside of the particularly talented or gifted person is accompanied in official discourses by a more or less wholesale adaptation of neoliberal notions of “creative class” or “creative cities.” In this conception, “creativity” including fashion design is supposed to be exercised by particularly talented individuals who have a problematic relation to business success (because it might compromise their genuine creativity) and who exercise their creativity in particular “creative” areas of the city – like K Village or Tonghlor – where they are surrounded by art galleries and a diverse range of innovative restaurants and nightspots. The fashion market designers we have studied are clearly not understood to be creative in this respect; neither do they generally move in the city’s designated “creative” areas. Rather they represent an alternative model of innovation in fashion: we want to call this alternative model “creative mass.” We use the term “mass” instead of “class” for principally three reasons – first, because in Bangkok fashion design is quite obviously something of a mass phenomenon. It is not limited to or exercised exclusively by a “creative class” in Richard Downloaded by [Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore] at 01:33 21 March 2015 Consumption Markets & Culture 125 Florida’s sense of that term: a class composed of individuals who are professionally devoted to and who earn a living from “the creation of meaningful new forms” (Florida 2002, 8 – admittedly an inadequate definition of class by any mainstream sociological standard), or who aspire to such professional status. Instead, a lot of people from different, although generally middle-class, backgrounds and careers engage in this pursuit, and they often do it on the side as a complement or an alternative to other ways of having a career or earning a living. Indeed, fashion design can be understood to be a quite common way for young middle-class students or professionals to express themselves, and it is not always understood as a career or even an ambition itself. Such mass creativity is of course to some extent a result of the overproduction of university graduates, and in particular design graduates (in our survey almost all – 98% – of design operations contained at least one person with a university degree; at Rangsit University we were told that 50% of graduates start their own fashion business). Such an overproduction of skilled knowledge workers is of course not unique to Thailand. Creative scenes in Europe, like those of London, Berlin and Copenhagen, build systematically on a similar creative mass of unemployed, university-educated young people. Many of these work other jobs in management, marketing or the creative industries or commonly in the lower levels of the service industry (like restaurants and bars, cf. Lloyd 2006). In this sense, there are many similarities between Bangkok and, say Berlin, and a view from Bangkok’s markets can help us bring into focus the mass nature of creativity that is a feature of many European cities as well. However, an important difference lies in the fact that in Europe un- or underemployment among knowledge workers has, at least historically, tended to translate into the formation of an urban underground, where innovative practices like music, art and fashion are strongly linked to counter cultural attitudes or even social movement activism. While the activist dimension to such urban “undergrounds” has been weakened in recent years, a tenuous relationship remains between the idea of “genuine creativity” and market participation, as evidenced in the persistent problematic of “selling out” (Arvidsson 2007; Lloyd 2006). In Bangkok, no such tension exists. Not only do the fashion market designers that we interviewed generally not connect their “creativity” to any kind of anti-systemic attitudes, but Thai subcultural practice is in general quite void of any political connotations, however vague. This is probably because successful subcultural styles have either been imported in an already commercialized format (as in the case of hip-hop or punks) or have been commercially initialized from the very beginning (like in the case of the Korean pop-music tribes or “Ktribes” that energize Thai teenagers). This absence of a political dimension also probably has to do with the fact that the kinds or reflexive linguistic innovation that draws on and plays with commercial consumer culture remains a predominantly middle-class phenomenon, while the real contradictions in Thai society lie elsewhere, as evidenced by the 2010 riots. Nonetheless, it remains interesting to see to what extent the kinds of symbolic innovation that are presently linked to the re-discovery and commercialization of rural “traditions” might or might not be linked to new forms of political mobilization in the countryside (Kitjarsa 2009; Sopranzetti 2012; cf. Lockard 1998). However, the important point remains that in Bangkok “creativity” is exercised on the market, in a quite tangible physical sense of that preposition, and no contradiction prevails between being a “creative” designer and having market success, rather the latter is part of the definition of the former. Again, a shift of perspective might be useful in enabling us to view Western creative economies differently. Up until quite recently, much scholarship in this field has been imbued with an explicit notion of Downloaded by [Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore] at 01:33 21 March 2015 126 A. Arvidsson and B. Niessen cultural practice as an anti-commercial activity that is somehow corrupted through market influence, no doubt an inheritance from a strong romantic tradition that has seen “art” and “commerce” as intrinsically opposed (and, in the social sciences, from the influential Cultural Studies traditions that has tended to fetishize “resistance” as an inherent feature of cultural production). However, recent studies have emphasized how contemporary creative scenes might remain anti-commercial in rhetoric, but are in practice quite welcoming to cooperation with the established creative industries as well as other actors (Currid 2007). A third sense in which this creativity can be defined as a mass phenomenon is spatial. Thai fashion design is not exercised in any particular designated “creative” part of the city. Rather, the market in which it unfolds is an amorphous relational mass that traverses different locations at different times – night markets, Siam Square, university campuses, bars and night venues, neighborhoods where foreign tourists congregate, street markets in working class neighborhoods and so on. This amorphous mass tends to invade or at least put pressure on official attempts to manage space. After the 2010 riots, the places burned down or destroyed around Siam Square were almost immediately invaded by street vendors who sold fashions and designer goods; and when the Chulalongkorn University administration tried to curb the small fashion market emerging at the edge of its university campus by placing potted plants along the sidewalk lining its campus, the street vendors simply uprooted the plants and used the pots to display their wares (Haanstad 2011). This creative mass manifests itself in particularly intense “moments” like the Weekend Market on Chatuchak. Overall, the use of space and the relation of space to innovation resembles more the model depicted by AbdouMaliq Simone in his ethnography of African cities (although he mentions Bangkok too), and the skills of connecting, linking, trafficking negotiating that such a modality of living urban space entails, than the rigid, homogenous and streamlined spaces created by attempts to develop creative neighborhoods in Western cities, and suggested by the related Anglo-America discourse on “creative cities.” As Angela McRobbie (1998) has suggested, a similar perspective on creative scenes in Western cities, emphasizing their interconnectedness with the “ordinary” urban fabric, the way in which artists and other creatives are grounded in the everyday life of urban neighborhoods, and the link between the exercise of creativity and the ability to navigate the city in general, could help us to de-mystify the process of “creativity” and to tie it back to a more realistic and multi-layered perspective on the city and its potential for innovation. Finally, innovation in Bangkok’s fashion markets is genuinely social. Not only is it empirically difficult to distinguish innovation from imitation, but also designers themselves have but vague conceptions of this difference. There is a concept of the origins of an idea, but it is also recognized that those origins might themselves consist in part in an imitation. At any rate there is no conception of imitation as “theft”; rather to be imitated and to inspire others is understood as something that contributes to one’s reputation and standing (see Gisclair 2008 on how similar values infuse Chinese legal practice around intellectual property). Again, we would suggest that such a view on innovation and imitation is not specific to Bangkok, but that it describes the actual dynamics in urban creative scenes rather well. For example, within the electronic music scene that was been the backbone of the creative scenes of cities like Copenhagen and Berlin throughout the 1990s, the relation between imitation and innovation was configured in very similar ways. Moreover, the Bangkok model might offer a more realistic description of how the relation between innovation and imitation is configured within the Consumption Markets & Culture 127 Downloaded by [Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore] at 01:33 21 March 2015 fashion system overall. Despite frequent emphasis on the importance of protecting intellectual property, fashion, even high fashion de facto operates as a design commons where innovations are immediately available for everyone to appropriate and develop (Bollier and Racine 2005, 8; cf. Boon 2010). Indeed, in Italian high fashion revenues have successively shifted from the actual sale of garments to financial rent attributable to brand strength (Arvidsson and Malossi 2011). Although famous fashion designers might sometimes publically accuse each other of theft, designers have been routinely building on the ideas of other designers for a long time (cf. Pouillard 2011), and today the most profitable operations in the global fashion economy, fast fashion companies like H&M and Zara, have incorporated rapid imitation as their core business idea. 6. Learning from Bangkok? The neoliberal model of creativity developed at a particular historical conjuncture. In major Western cities in the mid-1990s, a generation of urban bohemia that had grown up in the counter-cultures of the 1980s found themselves at the receiving end of the dot.com boom. At the same time, rampant real-estate speculation created plenty of room for gentrification whereby artistic lifestyles could actually translate into intangible wealth to be realized on the housing market. For a short time, a very particular segment of the population – the Bobos who carried the 1970s tradition of loft-living to new heights – could actually experience themselves as a “creative class” who drove the economy by putting their own, previously unrecognized, inner talents to work. To city planners and pundits, it seemed that attracting this segment would solve most problems of post-industrial urban decay. Today, this neoliberal embrace of creativity has ossified into dogma to be exported to emerging markets cities like Bangkok. In the West, its historical moment has passed and its recipes are now very far from reality. In Bangkok, this discourse still functions as part of an expanding and ever-more cosmopolitan urban economy. Consultants find a ready ear in government agencies with a flair for things Western, and the creation of “creative neighborhoods” in areas like Thong Lor or Ari contributes to the city’s still thriving condominium market. However, as a recipe for fostering genuine immaterial productivity, the imported neoliberal model of creativity contrasts quite strongly with reality on the ground. What we have there is a quite different kind of creativity. Like indie designers in Indonesia, the Bangkok fashion designers represent a selforganization of immaterial labor that has occurred in independence both from state support and from corporate value flows. While the creative class that began to take form in Western cities in the late 1990s labored principally to supply corporate capital with the kind of sign values that could translate into brandable content, Thai night market designers cater to the esthetic needs of their peers. They do not make websites, brands or communication campaigns for big companies, but cheap and cheerful garments that are actually worn in clubs, on the street, on university campuses and on the markets where a lot of sociality takes place. They take part in a market culture that is deeply imbedded in the urban life of their peers and where, as we have seen, fashion design is not always conceived as a career apart from ordinary life. Although in Bangkok this operates on a much larger and above all denser scale, the phenomenon is similar to the local design and crafts scenes composed of small artisans catering to the esthetic needs of their peers that are presently emerging in Berlin, Downloaded by [Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore] at 01:33 21 March 2015 128 A. Arvidsson and B. Niessen London, Milano and Brooklyn (Anderson 2012). Maybe a look at Bangkok can help us to better understand the potential of such “maker” scenes. Like the maker scenes that have begun to proliferate in Western cities in the wake of the economic crisis of 2008, Bangkok’s fashion markets are post-neoliberal in a tangible economic way. The Asian financial crisis of 1997 created mass unemployment among the core of an emerging Thai creative class (in Florida’s sense of that term). Advertising, communication, PR, branding and media were all booming industries in the 1990s; now they folded, leaving hordes of well-educated twentysomethings on the street. Such as in the case of the Indonesian “indie fashion” scene, Bangkok’s fashion markets emerged as a reaction to that crisis: as the outcome of intellectual underemployment combined with the need to gain access to the use values of global consumer culture – fashion, music, entertainment – in new and cheaper ways. For instance, in Indonesia, the new fashion scene became part of a strategy for middleclass youth to demarginalize, deterritorialize and assert themselves in the world economy “on their own terms” (Luvaas 2010, 1). In doing so, the Bangkok designers also articulated the beginnings of a “post-neoliberal” way of organizing immaterial production. Obviously, the separation between the mass creativity that we have discussed and the neoliberal networks of creativity that are promoted by official Thai bodies is not watertight. Some designers make the move from the night market to designated creative neighborhoods and in some instances, as in the now trendy Ari neighborhood, proximity to the JJ weekend probably contributes to drive gentrification processes. However, like the pirate modernity that Ravi Sundaram (2010) speaks of or the “globalization form below” model suggested by Mathews and others, this creative mass generally moves in spaces and networks that are quite distinct from the malls and condominiums where the practices of neoliberal globalization are acted out. Rather than viewing the designer markets as an object of “exploitation,” through trend scouting and the appropriation of creative energies, exponents of the neoliberal model of creativity have generally looked down on this creative mass. Indeed, our suggestion is that mass creativity might indeed harbor features of a form of immaterial production that might point beyond the neoliberal model. What would the contours of such a “post-neoliberal” model be? First, the fashion markets operate as commons-based economies. The conception of intellectual property plays almost no part, not even at the ideological level. Instead, innovation is conceived of as collective practice, the result of the circulation of objects and signs. Similar to Shan-zhai culture, brands and logos are mixed with elements from Western and Asian pop culture and freely recycled, and common cultural resources are appropriated by a practice of overwriting them with elements from one’s own logo or inserting them within the stylistic universe of one’s own brand. Second, this commons economy has a very particular relation to the market. Common resources and cheap, readily accessible material production creates low barriers to entry. Similar to the case of Chinese Shanzhai networks, or the Chinese consumer goods sector in general, according to Giovanni Arrighi (2007), competition happens not through the appropriation and privatization of common resources, but through their flexible utilization: value, both monetary and reputational, is to be gained by making an intelligent variation to an existing trend, by combining a pop icon popular at the moment with a dress style in vogue. Contrary to the neoliberal logic (or the logic of Western-style capitalism in general), gains thus realized are not understood as the results of one’s private resources and are generally not used to strengthen one’s permanent market position. Instead, such gains are Downloaded by [Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore] at 01:33 21 March 2015 Consumption Markets & Culture 129 understood as resulting from individual variations on a socialized innovation process and as transitory gains on innovations that, over time, revert into common resources (over a week, as many or our designers estimated to time window in which gains from a successful individual variation were possible). While much further work obviously needs to be done to dissect the foundations of such a possible “post-neoliberal” model of creativity, what we have seen in Bangkok, together with both Luvaas observations of indie fashion in Indonesia and much of the emerging literature around commons-based business ecosystems, indicates something similar to what Arrighi (2007) has (perhaps excessively) described as a “non-capitalist market society” in the case of China: a multitude of small and networked businesses each making modest gains on their ability to temporarily achieve excellence in their use of common resources. Could such a model help us to better understand emerging networks of bottom-up “presumption” that are emerging around the world today, and their migration into the “tangible” and “important” sectors like open hardware and the food economy? Could it help us in devising systems that are able to support and govern them in more efficient ways? Maybe we could learn something in that respect from Bangkok’s fashion markets. 7. Conclusion This article presents Bangkok’s fashion markets as an example of an alternative model of creativity and innovation in fashion. While our study highlights features that are typical of Bangkok as an Asian metropolis, we are not interested in simply suggesting an Asian model. Rather, we propose that “a view from Bangkok” can cast new light on how creativity and innovation are practiced in markets in general, thus destabilizing the hegemony of the neoliberal model of “creativity.” In the model that we propose, creativity and markets are deeply integrated rather than opposed. Markets are at the same time social spaces and venues of peer sociality and the formation of subcultures. “Selling out” is not a problem and there is no deep opposition between business success and the pursuit of cool (cf. Frank 1997). This market-based sociality is a force of collective creativity where innovation travels through physically dense social spaces in cascades of creative imitation. Notions of intellectual property are close to irrelevant. Instead, the fashion markets are organized as innovation commons where a large number of small entrepreneurs can make rather marginal profits by adding their variations to the general trend. Finally, the fashion markets are commonly popular; they cater to a consumer audience of peers, producing affordable use values, and the markets are deeply integrated into the everyday popular life of the city. Our suggestion is that our perspective might have general validity in understanding practices of market-based innovation in diverse contexts and that potentially it might illustrate the contours of a possible future mode of creative production based on labor-intensive commons economies. References Allison, Anne. 2009. “The Cool Brand. 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