Learning from Bangkok’s Fashion Markets

Image courtesy of bkk fashion

The prevailing 'creativity paradigm' has been accused of misrepresenting the dynamics of socialized processes of value creation, of imposing an ideological conception of intellectual property and of providing a neoliberal justification for unequal or precarious relations of production. While the critics are often justified, none of them have developed an alternative model of understanding the dynamics and potential politics of socialized processes of immaterial production. This public lecture uses the experience of Bangkok's fashion markets to begin to articulate an alternative understanding of creativity. The aim is not so much to articulate an 'asian' or even 'bangkok' model of creativity, but to investigate what diverse aspects emerge when viewed from an empirical context different form that of the US or UK. The speakers will suggest that the Bangkok experience highlight three dimensions of creativity that not only apply to many forms of socialized innovation process sin the East as well as in the West, but that the speakers suggest are particularly pertinent to understanding the new relations of socialized immaterial production that are presently made possible by information and communication technologies. These are, the emergent, intrinsically social or 'mass' nature of innovation and the concomitant fusion of innovation and imitation; the fusion of 'creativity' and everyday life, and the 'small and networked' nature of production chains.