Artifacts and Organizations

11

Fine Fashion: Using Symbolic Artifacts, Sensemaking, and Sensegiving to Construct Identity and Image

Rossella Cappetta

Bocconi University, Milan, Italyand SDA Bocconi Graduate School of Management

Dennis A. Gioia

Venn State University

At times the ugliest and most disagreeable things are in fashion almost as if fashion itself wants to demonstrate its power in having us wear all that is most detestable; its nonchalance in proposing in one instance the useful, in a second the absurd and yet in a third that which is totally indifferent in terms of practicality and esthetic, thus demonstrating its complete carelessness of the objective norms of life and returning to other motivations, that is, to typically social ones.

—Simmel (1895)

Fine fashion ...