The Microsociology of Aesthetic Evaluation: Selecting Runway Fashion Models.

Fashion model selection is a targeted case of aesthetic evaluation. For almost 100 years—beginning with data which Herbert Blumer collected in the 1930s—scholars have tried to understand how models are selected. Most have taken a critical and structural approach. I rely instead on a microsociology which centers endogenous decision processes. It highlights the agency and constraints of situational perception and situational stratification, yielding a novel analysis of the casting encounter. Data comes from an ethnography of a fashion week in a semi-peripheral city. It includes backstage evaluations gathered during a stint as a casting agent. I find that agents surprisingly ignore faces, instead focusing on the embodied cues of height/heels, the walk, and body size. Sustained microsociological analysis opens a layered mode of perception highlighting the dynamics of time, attention, emotion, and situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]