Status and style in creative industries : The case of the fashion system.

Creative, cultural, or aesthetic industries, for which creativity and aesthetic values are central, have become an important topic of investigation in economics and social sciences.

Uncertainty, which is an essential question for the understanding of all industries, takes a specific form when creativity and aesthetics are involved.

In all creative industries, uncertainty is, for producers, about what cultural meanings to offer and, for customers, about what cultural meanings to purchase, two sides of uncertainty respectively called egocentric and altercentric uncertainty by Joel Podolny.

Several institutional and strategic mechanisms exist to reduce uncertainty and allow creative industries to operate.

The existing sociological literature on uncertainty and uncertainty reduction in creative industries does not specify the level of uncertainty reached once reduction mechanisms are played out and assumes that these mechanisms are the same across industries.

The fashion industry, one of the biggest and most significant creative industries, offers a very relevant setting for the understanding of how uncertainty and uncertainty reduction mechanisms are deployed in a specific industrial context.

Fashion-specific institutions such as the fashion show organize the generation of cultural meanings, or styles, in the fashion industry.

Styles are attached to fashion houses, which are also ranked in status orderings.

The stability and simplicity of status orderings is an indication of low egocentric and altercentric uncertainty, and thus of the success of both institutional and strategic uncertainty reduction mechanisms in fashion, comparatively more than in other industries.

Status distinctions are the frame in which styles are generated and controlled.