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Dating apps promise a 'digital fix' to the 'messy' matter of love by means of datafication and algorithmic matching, realising a platformisation of romance commonly understood through notions of a market's rationality and efficiency. Reflecting on the findings of a small-scale qualitative research on the use of dating apps among young adults in London, we problematise this view and argue that the specific form of marketisation articulated by dating apps is entrepreneurial in kind, whereby individuals act as brands facing the structural uncertainty of interacting with 'quasi-strangers'. In so doing, we argue, dating app users enact a Luhmanian notion of interpersonal trust, built on the assessment of the risk of interacting with unfamiliar others that is typical of digitally mediated contexts dominated by reputational logics. From a sociocultural perspective, dating apps emerge as sociotechnical apparatuses that remediate the demand to rationally choose a partner while at the same time reproducing the (im)possibility of doing so. In this respect, far from offering a new form of efficiency, they (re)produce the ontological uncertainty (Illouz, 2019) that characterises lovers as entrepreneurs.

Cover -- Title page -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- Fashion studies -- New ways of doing fashion -- The chapters -- 1 Critical Fashion Studies: Paradigms for Creative Industries Research -- Introduction -- Cultural policy -- Milieu of labour -- Art theory -- The object itself -- 2 London: Independent Fashion and 'Monopoly Rent' -- Introduction: The 'futures' student as human capital -- From the new King's Cross to Hackney Wick Fish Island -- The milieu of labour: London -- Fashion independents: Making a living -- The precarity of success? -- Conclusion -- 3 Berlin: Microenterprises and the Social Face of Fashion -- Introduction: The precarity of underemployment -- The milieu of labour: Berlin -- Fashion creativity in active neighbourhoods -- Social fashion in the city -- Fashion as art, fashion as social enterprise -- Conclusion -- 4 Milan: Fashion Microenterprises and Female-led Artisanship -- Introduction: City of global brands -- The milieu of labour: Milan -- Benetton and beyond -- Female-led artisanship: Milanese small-scale fashion production -- Conclusion -- 5 Click and Collect: Fashion's New Political Economy -- Introduction: The new political economy -- The new world of 'listing labour' -- Designers in multimediated fashion worlds -- Ajax, Birdsong and Not Just A Label -- Conclusion -- 6 Conclusion -- Appendix -- Berlin -- London -- Milan -- Events hosted -- Methodological note -- Notes -- Introduction -- Chapter 1: Critical Fashion Studies: Paradigms for Creative Industries Research -- Chapter 2: London: Independent Fashion and 'Monopoly Rent' -- Chapter 3: Berlin: Microenterprises and the Social Face of Fashion -- Chapter 4: Milan: Fashion Microenterprises and Female-led Artisanship -- Chapter 5: Click and Collect: Fashion's New Political Economy -- References -- Further Reading -- Index -- EULA.

This report provides an account of a series of interviews, observational visits and hosted events with 8-10 fashion designers in three cities: London, Berlin and Milan, carried out from 2012-2016. In some cases we interviewed the same designers two or three times over a period of nearly three years. The research project also entailed documented conversations and meetings with a range of fashion experts, consultants, legal advisors and policy makers in each city. Often these took place within the context of organised events undertaken as part of the research process. The aim was to investigate the kind of start-ups or micro-enterprises which have come into being in the last decade. We were interested in whether these were the outcome of pro-active urban creative economy policies or if they were self-organised initiatives, a reaction to the crisis of the euro-zone of 2008 and the consequent recession. Was it the case that long-term austerity policies and exceptionally high rates of youth and graduate unemployment across Europe had spawned these kinds of seemingly independent economic activities? We were also minded to consider the role of intellectual property (IP) and copyright in fashion as part of the wider UK government agenda for growth and wealth creation within the creative economy as a whole.