Possessed by the Zeitgeist: Inspiration and Prophecy in the Business of Fashion

Abstract

The ability to foretell the future-and, as such, to conquer and determine it-is an essential preoccupation of contemporary business, which supposedly distinguishes the winners from the losers. The business of fashion is perhaps the case in point, being inherently concerned with continually staking out new paths into the future. In this article, I explore how fashion designers deal with this imperative through processes of seeking inspiration, constituting a distinctive "technology of prefiguration" by which the designers come to enter a prophetic condition. Rooted in an animistic mode of being, this attests to a shamanic practice, which entails the designers becoming possessed by a zeitgeist and, hence, turning into prophetic agents with particular visions of the future. The world of fashion is, in this sense, populated by entities and processes not commonly associated with modern business, in that animistic tendencies, jumping things, spiritual beings and shamanic efforts enable the designers to attain otherwise unattainable prophetic viewpoints. Underlying this argument is a more general ambition to open up our conception of business, as I suggest that business anthropologists may do well to uphold a profound naïveté in their methodology, which may essentially challenge and revise our assessment of modern capitalism.

Foretelling the future: The fashion designer as shaman

“…3. I have discussed these issues in more detail in a recent article published in the Journal of Business Anthropology (Vangkilde 2015 In this sense, the question is not why the fashion designers might say and think that orchids leap out, things jump, a zeitgeist exists, and a designer is kind of a shaman. Rather, the question is what a different world this may be (cf.…”

In Search of Newness

“…Among anthropologists, this preoccupation with, and search for, newness has not gone unnoticed. Not least in business anthropology, a broad range of publications on creativity (Moeran and Christensen 2013;Moeran 2014), innovation (Lex 2016;Mikkelsen and Vangkilde 2021), and entrepreneurship (Briody and Stewart 2019;Pfeilstetter 2021), as well as related themes -such as design (Murphy 2016;Smith et al 2016), anticipation (Vangkilde 2015;Garsten and Sörbom 2021), and futures (Salazer et al 2017;Brandt and Vangkilde 2023) -have come out in the past decade. While some of these publications focus on the relevance and contributions of anthropology in processes of actively and strategically generating newness, others are more interested in critically uncovering the cultural imaginaries and socio-political processes underlying attempts to bring forth "the new."…”