Refashioning Napoletanità: Identity, Corporeality, and Value Creation in the Neapolitan Bespoke Tailoring Industry
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Despite Naples' gritty, dangerous image being incongruous with conventional bourgeois aesthetics of Italian luxury fashion, Neapolitan bespoke tailoring is regarded as one of the most prestigious sectors of global luxury menswear. Editorial attention on these tailoring firms (sartorie) fail to fully unpack the complex interplay between Neapolitanness (napoletanita') and commercial value. Drawing on two summers of fieldwork in Naples and Florence, I argue that the sartorie conceive of their work's value as deriving from their napoletanita', understanding Neapolitan cultural identity's multiplicity of meanings and contradictions in ways that cohere with their ascendancy in luxury fashion. I first consider how history, renegotiated, is a powerful modality through which sartorie experience and express their napoletanita'. Naples' storied Greek, Roman, and Enlightenment past resolves tensions between the sartoria's cultural prestige and contemporary Naples' lack thereof, while "traditional" Neapolitan narratives of labor and handcraftsmanship resolve the luxury industry's inherent tension between commerce and exclusivity. The Mafia's violent 20th century legacy is understood as testifying to the enduring spirit of Neapolitans for having survived. Second, I outline how for sartorie artisanship rests upon a productive tension between the eye's perfect judgment and the hand's imperfect unmechanicality. Artisanship breaks down the traditional dichotomy between Maussian gift and Marxian commodity, by incorporating inalienable napoletanita', creating producer-client social obligations, and obscuring certain social relations of production in the sartoria. After Douglas, I suggest that the sartorie's corporeal concerns about the lack of artisanal eye or handcraftsmanship i competing menswear sectors evince social concerns about the gift of napoletanita's susceptibility to being threatened by industrialization. The final section centers a value-based understanding of labor processes and cultural commodification in safeguarding the future of waning artisanal industries, suggesting how the EU might implement geographical indication protection schemes beyond agricultural produce and foodstuffs industries.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | 2016 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Wong, Renjie |
|---|---|
| Primary advisor | Yanagisako, Sylvia |
| Degree granting institution | Stanford University, Department of Anthropology |
Subjects
| Subject | artisanship |
|---|---|
| Subject | cultural commodification |
| Subject | gift |
| Subject | geographical indication protection |
| Subject | Naples |
| Subject | value |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
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- User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
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- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC-ND).
Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- Wong, Renjie (2016). Refashioning Napoletanità: Identity, Corporeality, and Value Creation in the Neapolitan Bespoke Tailoring Industry. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: http://purl.stanford.edu/yw340gw9111
Collection
Undergraduate Research Papers, Department of Anthropology, Stanford University.
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- Contact
- renjie@stanford.edu
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