Seeing Culture Through the Eye of the Beholder: Four Methods in Pursuit of Taste

Ashley Mears
Assistant Professor
Department of Sociology
Boston University
Abstract
When it comes making aesthetic decisions, people commonly account for their taste with
intuition. A cultural good, symbol, or object is simply right and respondents know it
when they see it. This essay investigates the cultural meanings professional tastemakers
see as they make such deliberations, while also illustrating the problems sociologists have
in seeing culture. Using the case of fashion model casting and scouting, I present four
methods to trace how cultural producers recognize and value models looks in the global
fashion market, demonstrating how each method results in a different emphasis on how
culture is used to acquire and deploy aesthetic sense. First, interviews capture
justifications of aesthetic decisions, as well as general processes about day-to-day work
routines, which are next tested with network analysis, the second method, which
emphasizes structural arrangements in taste decisions. The third method, ethnography,
discovers taste as a situated form of knowledge production, and emphasizes culture in
interaction. The fourth and related method, observant participation, sees taste as
phenomenological as culture becomes embodied and tacit consciousness. Each of these
methods is an optical device which renders a particular and complimentary account of
taste and which affords researchers a certain way to see how culture works.
Keywords
Incipient taste, cultural production, valuation process, fashion, looks
Words: 10,596
Prepared for Special Issue, Measuring Culture at Theory and Society
Correspondence with Author: Ashley Mears, Department of Sociology, Boston
University, 96 Cummington Mall, Boston MA 02215. Telephone: 617-358-0637.
Email: mears@bu.edu.

Introduction
Writing in 1969, sociologist Herbert Blumer noted with curiosity the behavior of fashion
buyers in the womens garment industry in Paris. He was struck by how extensive the
selection process was even though it yielded only a handful of new designs each season.
Despite working relatively independently of each other, garment buyers together
converged on these few designs. On the surface however, when asked about their
preferences, buyers could only explain that they liked the garments they found personally
stunning (1969, p. 280).
Decades later, as I spent time among designers and fashion show producers in
New York and London as part of an ethnography of the fashion modeling market, I
witnessed the formation of the modeling market as a winner-take-all structure, with a
handful of superstars at the top of a huge pile of struggling competitors (Frank and Cook
1995). Not only do most high-fashion models have very similar looks in terms of height
(between 59 and 511), weight (34 bust-24 waist-34 hips), and physiognomy (with
young, typically white, and symmetrical faces), additionally there is remarkable
convergence on which models are chosen for high-end fashion jobs (Godart and Mears
2009). These models are simply understood by producers as being the really good
girls, and though they profess their tastes as personal feelings, they feel it together.
If models are chosen according to personal taste, how does this unwittingly
converge into a collective trend? We see this problem repeatedly in the sociology of
culture, where fashion dynamics operate in domains far beyond dress (Aspers and Godart
2013): people think they are relying on personal feelings and judgments when making

aesthetic deliberationsin everything from the choice of their babys name (Lieberson
2000) to their tastes for music (Salganik et al. 2006) yet somehow everyone happens to
decide similarly at the same time, thus establishing observable patterns in taste among
social groups. Cultural meanings obviously play a role in shaping peoples behavior, but
how do they emerge simultaneously? Blumer reasoned that cultural producers do a lot of
work to be in fashion and to anticipate what he described as incipient and inarticulate
tastes, a sense for what will crest into a trend in the proximate future. Incipient taste must
emerge, he thought, from shared cultural understandings, in which buyers and designers
are all chasing the future direction of fashionableness. Unlocking the ways in which this
collective taste emerges, Blumer reasoned, is at the heart of understanding cultural
change. Yet it poses a methodological problem, for if incipient taste is both invisible and
a guiding force of social action, how does the sociologist detect, let alone measure, it?
Working myself as a fashion model for two years during a qualitative study of the
fashion modeling industry, I attended dozens of castings, photo shoots and runway
shows, both as an observer and as an observant participant (Waquant 2004). I attended
organized scouting events in major cities, interviewed freelance scouts about their search
for new faces across Eastern Europe and Russia, and sat with casting directors as they
auditioned models for their Fashion Week catwalks in New York and London. I talked
with modeling agents, casting directors, magazine editors, stylists, and designers at work
and after hours in bars, parties, and at their homes, eventually interviewing a sample of
20 bookers (agents who represent models) and 20 clients (people who hire models for
work), and 12 scouts (freelancers and agency employees who travel extensively in search
of models).

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Through each contest, casting, show, sleek design studio and squat Russian office

building, I took notes on the form and content of these interactions. I listened to how
agents and clients spoke to one another and to models, how they interacted with each
other as well as with the materials at hand: bodies, pictures, or clothing. I focused my
field notes around the problem of evaluation and valuation in those banal moments of
routine workcould I tell what looks were valuable, for instance? How did feelings shift
and change over the course of an interaction, or with a garment perhaps? How do these
tastemakers know which bodies will be fashionable, something which they must
continually reassessed, since fashion is by definition change? And empirically, what are
the best ways that I could know how they know?
This paper unpacks how a personal felt sense of taste is shared among different
people. In what follows I reflect on four complementary research strategies I used to
access how cultural producers mobilize culture as they do the work of deciphering and
making trends in the fashion model industry: interviews, network analysis, participant
observation, and embodied ethnographic practice. Each method highlights a set of
mechanisms and processes of taste formation, and each suggests a particular
conceptualization of culture. Fashion editors and model scouts use discourses of intuition
to account for their sense of good girls, which they explain as the outcome of their
eye, an embodied skill they deploy to recognize the future direction of fashion in the
hundreds of new faces they screen for modeling jobs each year. However, interviews
misrecognize as intuition what network analysis reveals to be macro structural alignments
in the field, as well as contingent interactions that unfold through ethnography. While

each can be used as a standalone method, they generate the most comprehensive
understanding when used together.
What follows in not a full account of what taste is a cultural field, but rather, I
give a narrative of a research process in pursuit of taste, and the different theoretical
orientations at which this select roster of methods arrives. As the biography of a research
problem, this paper shows how different kinds of methods let us see different angles of
culture at work, while allowing that there remain aspects of incipient taste that
researchers may simply not be able to measure, but can describe with self-reflection.
Sociological theories of taste, and the role of culture in it, depend in part on the methods
employed. This inquiry suggests that sociologists allow a plurality of conceptualizations
of culture and embrace multi-methods approaches to measuring culture.

Evaluating Taste, Seeing Culture

The problem of distinguishing quality in markets for symbolic goods, in this case the
looks of women,1 is one of valuation and evaluation, a staple inquiry in cultural sociology
that underlies questions of knowledge and expertise (Benzecry and Krause 2010),
markets and the construction of worth in economic systems (Beckert and Aspers 2011),
and inequality and hierarchy formation (Bourdieu 1984; for a review see Lamont 2012).
It is also central to the sociology of cultural objects, which tries to understand how
meanings are mobilized into aesthetic form as cultural objects (Griswold 1986).

1

Women are the focus of this paper because they receive the bulk of attention in fashion, likely resulting
from the size of womens fashion and the related gendered construction of womens display value.

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Fashion modeling is a good case to examine valuation as both an economic (as in

price) and a cultural process (as in worth). In the fashion model market, a models
looka combination of personality and physicalityis available for rent to clients,
including editors, fashion designers, photographers, and stylists seeking to hire models
and use their images for advertising. Bookers broker the trade, in exchange for a charge
of 20% commission from both the model and the client. Looks are a type of aesthetic
good because of their high aesthetic and symbolic value, which must be converted into
commodities for economic exchange in what Joanne Entwistle has dubbed the aesthetic
economy (Entwistle 2009). Unlike commodities, models are unique, they are a type of
good that Lucien Karpik calls singularities, which require special work to ascertain their
worth (2010).2 At the same time, models cohere into looks that are articulated as
stylistically similar. While individual models are unique and their success is
unpredictable, looks can coalesce around boundaries, much like books in genres within
the literary field.
The fashion market is also a useful case to investigate the processes through
which cultural values as discernments of worth among a large pool of similarly
beautiful women get translated into market action, that is, how do shared sensibilities
orient the choice of any given model? Models are a case to see how group culture
emerges, and how people reach consensus on unspoken and ambiguous things. This
paper documents how people get on the same page without explicitly trying to or even
knowing that they are. Like choosing a babys name (Lieberson 2000), in choosing
models there are no obviously right answers, no ultimate authority and no rule-making

2

In a similar vein, Patrik Aspers calls these status markets, as opposed to standard markets (2009).

organization that governs the selection process. The problem of Which model? is
insoluble, and yet it gets resolved every day (e.g. Bielby and Bielby 2994).
To account for taste, one sociological tradition follows structural analyses of
class. Writing at the turn of the 20th century, Veblen characterized acts of consumption as
acts of invidious comparison, a framework that inspired Simmel on fashion trends and
later Bourdieu, who analyzed taste as a form of status distinction, thus coupling culture
and class structure (Bourdieu 1984; Simmel 1957; Veblen 2007 [1899]). Contrary to
prevailing theory at the time, Blumer saw taste not as something governed by
demonstrations of elite status, but as driven by a desire to be aligned with the preferences
of the social zeitgeist (1969, p. 289). Tastemakers seemed to be collectively groping in
anticipation of the next fashion trendthey are seeking to catch the proximate future,
to name the direction of modernity, the sense of modern style (1969, p. 280). To Blumer,
there must be something in the air, or in shared social space of cultural economies, that
enables producers to reach consensus on the incommensurable, and importantly, these
meanings are not static. Cultural meanings are communicated, interpreted, and reworked
in everyday practice (1937).
Culture can be both rooted in status hierarchies and worked out in interactions,
but any explanation of how culture works owes its genesis to the methods used to study
it. In the sociology of culture, researchers have struggled with how to measure culture in
accounting for social outcomes (Ghaziani 2009). The case of fashion modeling illustrates
that there are many ways to try to understand how meaning emerges and informs agents.
In what follows, I move across four methodological terrains of taste, each one shining a
spotlight into the conceptual blind spots of another. I end with a fragmented account of

incipient taste which, when taken as a whole, links culture from across micro and macro
levels of analysis.

The First Method: Interviews

The casting director Jordan Bane is in charge of choosing models for the
celebrated luxury fashion houses of Europe. His posh London studio is lined with stacks
of art books, magazines new and old, and his walls feature, among collectible artworks,
an assortment of Polaroid pictures of girls haphazardly hung with scotch tape. Some of
them are full-length body shots, some smiling, most are staring out blankly into the
room. Jordan and his assistant sort through 100 images of models a day, or about 3,000
faces a year, emailed to his office by agencies around the world. He describes his job as
that of an editor: My main role is to service designers to provide them with a suitable
kind of look of girl thats appropriate for their ethos and their world, basically.
I first met him in castings for Fashion Week shows, each one taking the form of a
handshake, a brief and generic chatWhere are you from?then he would take a
quick snapshot photograph and ask to see me walk down the length of the room and
back. When he agreed to be interviewed, I was thrilled at the chance to ask Jordan what
it is that he looks for in all those castings, and how a Polaroid makes its way around the
world into his office, and how a client like himself makes the decision to choose any
particular model. Though we talked for almost an hour, he could never quite find the
words to explain it.

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Jordan explains that he just knows what hes looking for, and he knows it when

he sees it. Echoing the words of the other clients and agents I interviewed, Jordan is
guided by what is commonly called their eye for looks, a sixth sense or embodied
register that tells them, physically, when a look is right. Having a good eye means
predictive capability: Jordan can see a face that others will recognize as right for this
moment in fashion.
Oftentimes, clients speak of seeing value in previously unknown faces as an act
brave discovery. They talk about these moments as great personal triumphs, like
pioneers striking gold among piles of rocks. Finding her is like finding a needle in a
haystack. On his discovery of Tatiana a few years ago, a teenage girl who became a
Vogue cover girl and minor celebrity, Jordan explained, I could tell the moment I saw
Tatiana. When I found Tatiana, thats like and he snapped his fingers, continuing:

It does something very physical, I mean it really does, and I think its
really obvious when its that kind of physical. Its a taste, its purely taste.
How else can you describe that? Why did I decide to buy this chair and
sofa? You know, for me, it ticks the box. You know its an internal thing!
- Jordan Bane, Casting Director for 20 years, London

They talk about the physical sensationsgoose bumps, butterflies, gut reaction
or they refused to elaborate, ending the discussion at, You just know. Howard Becker
noted that artists and mediators may not be able to put into words the principles by which
they make their choices. Rather, they use insider lingo to convey if it swings in jazz,

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or it works in the theatre (Becker 1982, p. 200). But they cannot state in advance what
led them to this one choice, so obvious after-the-fact. So how do they know it when
they see it, if they cannot actually name it?
Had Jordan Bane been schooled in the language of sociology, he might call it
habitus in the sense of an internal steering mechanism that feels like second nature
(Elias 1994 [1939])), or as a feel for the game, that pre-discursive familiarity with the
world one learns through practice (Bourdieu 1990: 66). Or, if he preferred cognitive
psychology, he may describe his eye as practical consciousness, an automatic sense of
attraction and repulsion. While each concept describes a place in the mind and body
where taste resides, neither concept tells us much about how taste forms or changes
direction.
Blumer ran into the same problem. His Parisian garment buyers answered in an
honest yet largely uninformative way, simply viewing some dresses as intrinsically and
obviously superior, while he could see no appreciable differences in the designs (1969:
279). He reasoned that buyers collectively and unwittingly grope for the proximate
future of fashion to express the zeitgeist. So, sitting there next to the powerful casting
director Jordan Bane, I wanted to know, does he grope?
If he does, the interview is a fraught tool for documenting it. By professing his
visceral reactions to the right girls, Jordan also professes the strength of his eye, thus
solidifying for the researcher and for himself his professional competence. If we look to
interviews to understand what motivates clients tastes, we are likely to find unreliable
and even contradictory answers (Vaisey 2009). Respondents know with certainty a good
face, and yet they dont know how they know it. They can identify, yet they cant

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identify their criteria of identification. In fashion, interviewees can certainly explain the
why of their tastes. But asking them why happens to be a pretty bad question, which
can only be imagined post-hoc. The very fact they cant put it in words suggests a more
complicated social process with multiple moving parts, probably beyond the sight of any
given respondent.
Interviews can provide valuable insight into the who, what, when of their decision
processes, revealing the logics that govern what they are looking for. In our
conversations, I learned that the majority of clients had backgrounds in the arts, either
attending art and design colleges or holding previous positions in culture industries.
They were voracious consumers of fashion, reading the same blogs and magazines, and
in the same way: no so much reading but looking through the images, noting which
models had become campaign girls and which photographers had changed or
consistent styles.
In interviews, clients and agents alike emphasized what they call personality.
Consider the following account offered by a model scout, on what she looks for in a
roomful of girls she considers for modeling contracts:

Its just a face which is unique. Its hard to say. Its really something that you
just feel, you just see, and you just say, Wow. Um, its something that you
never saw. And when you see the gorgeous face, you see it is the main thing.
There is something. And not just the beauty, but the personality inside, you can
see personality in her eyes, for example.
- Masha, Model agency owner and scout for 7 years, Moscow

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Personality comes up time and time again in my interviews. Clients are

concerned to discover the real or authentic selfhood of their models, which is crucial
to establish a fit with the image of the brand or design they are advertising (see also
Sadre-Orafai 2009). As a word, personality does not tell us much; it seems to just
restate the ambiguities of the look. And yet, when probed, the prominence of personality
reveals a great deal. For instance, a casting director said the following, when I ask her,
How do you size up a model? What do you look for when they come to meet you?

But I think its really about the confidence, something key. Eileen Ford [of Ford
Models] famously said that they have the X-factor. Its almost like you know
it. Theres a certain degree of confidence, a certain ease, and you know, theyre
not scared, theres no fear. We try and create an environment where people arent
scared, like hi, how are you, what do you do, you know? We have dogs, cats,
kids, like its definitely an environment that I wouldnt mind walking into.
- Rayna, Casting director of 17 years, New York

Sitting in Raynas casting studio in downtown New York, it was indeed a welcoming and
comfortable space. Rayna was wearing a beanie cap and and oversized sweater,
teenagers with headphones around their necks were chatting with her associates, indie
rock music was playing in the background. What Rayna was looking for was someone
with whom she could get along in such a space, someone who fit the surroundings and,
by implication, the hip downtown fashion designers she serviced. Almost all clients ask

13

to see a walk for show castings, which captures more than her technical capacity to wear
high heels and stand straight. This also captures the subtle cues of self, which they
describe as confidence, or a vibe, style, and feeling. They can likewise explain
which personality traits they dislike, explained a designer:

I think a lot of it too has to do with the personally, like I saw Kim [who did the
show last season] and she was telling me how things are really going the way she
wants in modeling. Like, I dont think shes booking a lot, and I dont think Im
going to cast her this time, because shes sort of negative, and I dont want that
coming out on me in my show.
- Kathy, Fashion designer of 5 years, New York

Interviews thus cue up the interactional nature of taste and its discovery in face-to-face
meetings, in which something happens that clients know is important, even as they are
hard pressed to discursively account for it.
Interviews also tell us what people do once theyve put their finger on the right
look. They feel it and sense it butterflies and goose bumpsand then they act on it.
This takes the form of decisive action: making a phone call, confirming the booking, and
spreading the word. In so doing, they tap into their social connections. Back in Raynas
office, I asked her what she does when she finds the right model:

Rayna: I get on the phone, and my first thing is Ill call my clients. Ill call a few
key photographers that we work with, like you should see this kid. Because its

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exciting and it also, you know, everyone is looking, our business is entertainment.
Were essentially looking to get excited, and to be part of something new.
Having been a model, and I was a stylist assistant and I worked at a magazine, I
think the key is youre never one person in this business, youre a team of people.
So for me, I can recommend her, they might not like her when she gets there.
Chances are they do because I have a good relationship with my clients and Ive
had the same clients since I started.

In describing her actions, Rayna indicates the importance of information sharing

and of her own status in adding value to a models look; again this cues to the role of
social interaction. Despite their own adherence to the romantic myth of the isolated
artistic creators, producers talk about their work revealed considerable reliance on their
peers. Interviews let me see the role of gossip and information sharing in the market,
albeit from a limited vantage point. Clients noted with pride how they spread the word to
their peers. Agents send fresh faces to clients with whom they think she will be valued,
and clients share new finds with each other. When a client wishes to hire models for an
upcoming job, they place her on option, giving the client the right but not the
obligation to hire her. Agents know the value of options, that they can spread news of
them to other clients to get a bandwagon effect going. Raynas own work biography,
holding multiple positions in fashion over the last two decades, lets her see the field and
enact influence within it. These diffusion mechanisms enable a shared sense of taste to
emerge across disparate yet connected actors.
Rayna also confirms the shared stakes of wanting to be a part of the cutting edge

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of fashion, and the emotional stakes in potentially creating a next top model. The
excitement is conveyed in interviews; the tenor in their voices gets higher and they talk
faster when describing discovery moments. Interviews, Pugh notes, are important not
just for what people say, but how they say it. Such emotional valences signal the things
that respondents find meaningful (Pugh 2013: 54).
Because interviews afford a forum for the performance of the ideal self, they
offer what Pugh calls honorable data, or that which informants deploy to make
themselves dignified in narratives about their actions (Pugh 2013). One way they do this
is by boundary symbolic boundaries between themselves and others whom they do not
want to look like. One of the first clarifications any agent or client will make about their
work is which segment of the market they service, editorial or commercial fashion, a key
marker of worth in the industry that parallels Pierre Bourdieus outline of the art field, as
a tension between avant-garde and commercially-successful art (Bourdieu 1993). In the
fashion field, editorial models tend to make less money, but they are considered more
prestigious than their commercial peers.
Models in each end of the market also have different looks. An editorial model is
typically described as having an unusualor to use a term that comes up often in the
businessan edgy look, perhaps not immediately recognizable as valuable to field
outsiders. This differs from the conventionally attractive models sought after for
commercial work, which bookers describe with terms like wholesome and girl-nextdoor, the kind that is legible to a mass middle-market. The editorial look, however, will
not make sense to the masses, nor should it. Explained one scouts assistant based in
Moscow as she talked about Polaroid pictures:

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You see, this girl is good. She is pretty. But she is only pretty. She doesnt have
anything specific. Shes too nice looking. So she can be only for catalogues
But this one, she has something specific! Or, look at this new Prada girl, shes
nothingshes not beautiful. But, she has something! Some image in it,
something which works, at this moment, it works!
- Ekat, Scouts assistant for 3 years, Moscow

Recognition of the editorial look requires a sharper eye acclimated to the edgy
and more volatile taste of high-end editorial fashion. Those who cant see it are relegated
to the lower status commercial market. Models that work too often in catalogues are
thought to embody the less prestigious work in the very ways they move and pose; they
do lame poses from which more refined women in high fashion are immune.
Interviews revealed some of the boundary work producers undertake to distinguish their
taste from others. By focusing on how producers draw boundaries between themselves
and others, interviews give us a sense of where people stand in relation to each other, and
where they want to be (Lamont and Molnar 2002).
Despite their rhetoric of individual taste and gut instinct, clients seem to rely quite
a bit on one another to inform their decisions, in ways they may not even recognize.
Vaisey argues that interviews give access to how respondents talk and think
deliberative cognitionbut respondents cultural schemas and frames of reference reside
elsewhere, inaccessible to an interview questionnaire (Vaisey 2009). Gut instincts are
misrecognized and talked over as deliberations in interviews. In a similar way,

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interactional aspects of social behavior appear to be talked over in interviews, minimized

and misrecognized with a discourse of individual proficiency.
As these tastemakers indicate, the actual naming of the right look is an
interactional and situated process, an act that is embedded in relationships between
clients and agents and models, all of whom are situated in relation to the field of fashion.
Thus while interviews in this project serve as a barometer to point to the things that
matter, the mechanisms of how and which things matter call for a set of tools.

The Second Method: Network Analysis

Like fashion intermediaries who choose models because they are good, Pierre Bourdieus
respondents in Distinction surely all thought they listened to good music. Such
accounts, however, elide identifiable patterns that sociologists can access beyond
interviews. To Bourdieu, the sense of good taste, or unconscious dispositions of the
habitus, cannot be understood without simultaneous reference to capital and field.
Bourdieu grounds an actors dispositions in the deployment and reproduction of his or
her mix of capitals, and taste is one vehicle actors wield in their struggle to climb to
better and more respected positions in their social space (1984). One way to identify the
field is through network analysis, to see whose taste aligns with whom.
The interviews so far suggest that producers tastes take shape through 1)
socialization in a professional and highly sociable environment, and 2) gossip and the
options hiring system that enables, but does not mandate, fashion houses to coordinate

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their choices of models. I knew that gossip and options are important since clients
brought them up in interviews, but I didnt know the broader significance of these
mechanisms. Based on the work of scholars like Podolny (2005) and the classics like
Simmel (1957), as well as hints in the interviews themselves, it seems reasonable to think
that status structures some of this collective choice-making.
With co-author Frederic Godart, we mapped out the pattern of collective taste
using social network analysis of one season of data from Fashion Week show records on
Style.com, and found that high status houses share the current crop of in-demand models,
while lower status houses tend to choose less popular models, a clear core-periphery
structure (Godart and Mears 2009). This tells us that a status structure is tied to
designers seemingly personal taste and what they called gut instincts. The right looks
are strongly correlated with the status of fashion houses, suggesting that designers look to
their high-status peers to guide their choice of models.
Sociologists find that uncertainty in markets is overcome with market
coordination devices, or what Lucien Karpik calls judgment devices (2010). Such
mechanisms, such as guidebooks and critics, rankings, brand identities, and networks all
render transactions possible because they provide consumers with credible knowledge
make reasonable choices. For clients to make their selections of models, they rely on a
set of informal judgment devices, or network sources of information (Karpik 2010, p.
45). These take the shape of gossip and information sharing, which takes a good deal of
participation in fashions social scene. During Fashion Week, the more formal device of
optioning enables information sharing. Options indicate which houses are considering

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hiring which models; as such, options communicate the status of a model by revealing the
status of her clients.
We concluded from these results that convergence on incipient taste happens in
three ways: 1) shared social space among clients and agents 2) information sharing
among them, and 3) status signaling with a network of fashion clients. Producers in
fashion share tastes along networks of peers, both as a way to align themselves vis--vis
other fashion houses, and because they talk to one another. However, we were left with a
few alternative explanations. It could be the case that there really are meaningful
distinctions between different candidates that designers and casting directors can
ascertain at castings, which we sociologists cannot detect; perhaps here is where
socialization into the field makes all of the difference, to decipher ambiguities like
personality and fit. We like to think this is unlikely, since models are groomed and
screened by selective bookers into a fairly homogenous pool of contenders before being
sent out to meet Fashion Week clients, but shy of experimental evidence, this cannot be
ruled out. For example, in their virtual online experiment called Music Lab, Salganik and
co-authors found musical preferences, in the form of song downloads, were highly
sensitive to other peoples preferences (Salganik, et al. 2006). Time-series data could
isolate the effects of status over different seasons, measuring the likelihood of one house
choosing a model after another house chooses her. Assuming the model stays relatively
constant, such a longitudinal technique could further isolate social influence effects on
taste.
Social network analyses are increasingly being employed to understand cultural
processes (Pachucki and Breiger 2010). One critique of this method for the study of taste

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hinges on selection effects: networks such as this one in fashion demonstrates structural
effects on behavioral outcomes, but many outcomes could reflect selection effects of
particular types of people who enter into those networks. While a plausible claim in the
fashion worldafter all, from interviews we have seen that backgrounds in the arts and
art school were shared by manythe fact of a priori shared culture among producers
does little to explain the ebb and flow of their tastes from season to season, or the subtle
differences among the producersthe stylistic prise de distance described by Bourdieu
([1992] 1996) and Grenfell and Hardy (2003) in which fashion houses attempt to
distinguish themselves from their competitors while keeping some similarities in order
not to be seen as unfashionable in the field (Godart 2012). While people likely learn
what good taste is from years in the business, broad processes of socialization cannot
explain how collective convergence happens at particular moments and unevenly among
all of the people working in fashion. In other words, it does not matter that the fashion
industry is composed of producers who have been selected because they share tastes,
since the fashion process itself triggers differences in taste that structure the industry and
competition.
By mapping the patters of tastemakers arriving at incipient taste, we discovered a
status structure that guides fashion producers choices, and based on the interviews, it is
reasonable to conclude that information-sharing via networks propel the collective search
for the right looks. Network analysis is good at these capturing macro-patterns of social
interaction that might otherwise be invisible, and it can document patterns of similar
tastes among buyers. Further work by Godart et al. (2013) has shown that the mobility of

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designers across fashion houses is an additional mechanism through which tastes and
styles diffuse and emerge.
The network analysis further reveals a contradiction between what interview
respondents say and how they act. In interviews, clients employed the rhetoric of
individual, personal taste, but in the network analysis, their choices are structured around
status hierarchies and imitation. This should be no surprise, as many ethnographers have
noted, an interview is also a performance site for posturing, and what people say may
contradict what people do in practice (most recently, see Jerolmack and Khan 2013).
But if interviews suggest that taste emerges from internalized norms and
capacities, network analysis arrives at a structural perspective of culture, and depicts
incipient taste as the result of both shared meanings and status signaling. This structural
perspective situates taste as a tool in struggles over capital, and culture becomes a
strategic resource available to climb hierarchies. This structural account of culture in a
Bourdieusian field gains much from a macro level of analysis. It misses people in
interactions. While network science depicts ties between clients, we have yet to see how
they relate to each other in actual space, rather than abstract social space. As it turns out,
interactions among tastemakers in particular situations play a crucial role in their
aesthetic decisions.

The Third Method: Participant Observation

22
Working as a model in the field, I had insider access and could watch taste

enactments and distinctions unfold in casting situations. Observing intermediaries at

work lead to several insights about taste as interactive knowledge, and about culture as
shared understandings of the world, grounded in people doing things together (Eliasoph
and Licthermann 2003). At casting auditions, the problem of incipient taste presents
itself yet again, now in real time:

I enter the casting for a Fashion Week show, one which presents the collections of
several designers. I ask the front desk person if Ill be meeting all of the
designers. She says no, the shows director knows what kind of vibe each
designer is going for, so shes screening which models they will see. She
explains, that this decision is not just about clothes, but rather, Its the clothes
and the person, and the energy they bring to it. I accept this explanation but am
puzzled, especially about what my own energy is or is perceived as being. When
I meet the shows director, she scans my portfolio, thanks me for coming, and
tells me Im going to meet three different designers, down the hall. At the first
stop, I greet a team of designers and one stylist. They look at me, smile, and one
designer says to the other: Shes perfect! The other one, without pause, agrees:
Youre our girl! What other shows are you doing, they ask, and when I tell
them a few names they nod approvingly. I try on three different outfits, and it
seems that with each change, they talk more excitedly about how good the clothes
look.

23
. Later backstage at the show, I learned that the designers had put in the
following instructions to the shows producers, when asked what kind of models
they were looking for: Models should be interesting, a size 6 or larger size 4,
some curvy and some straight. Also they can be white, black, Asian, and also
mixed races. I guess that is about all of them. Its difficult to specify but
basically they should be interesting looks.

My meeting with these designers was fortuitous indeed; the only criteria they had
specified was that candidates be interesting, a term that describes no more than
personality. It seems they did not know what they were looking for, and yet, they
knew precisely in the moment.
Naming the right look hinges upon a range of contingencies. Clients are attuned
to the field, to what has come before and is happening currently. In addition, we see from
the network analysis that they are sensitive to status considerations, which can raise the
value of a model and a trend in looks. What participant observation brings to the study of
incipient taste is its interactional nature. The sense of taste emerges as producers react to
each other, to the model, and to the garment that she dons. This sui generis social reality
is what Goffman called an interaction order, and through face-to-face encounters, a look
will come to be desired or discarded. Building on the premise of symbolic interactionism
that meanings are collectively worked out in contexts, ethnographers posit that values
belong to situations as much to people (Jerolmack and Khan 2013).
When these tastemakers sense that a look is working, we can observe an
interactional resonance, which McDonnell describes as an energy, a deep reverberation,

24

a mental buzz, the collective nodding of heads (McDonnell 2013, this issue). Resonance
can be observed in interactions between agents and models, between clients, and between
clothing objects, models, and clients. The interactive nature of aesthetic judgment
becomes apparent in the work of international model scouts, who are the initial
gatekeepers to the fashion modeling industry.
Alexey Vasiliev has been scouting for 17 years; when we met in his city of
Moscow, he brought composite cards and dated Polaroid pictures of teenage girls that had
become some of the worlds top models over the years. I spent two summers in the
Western side of Russia following scouts like Alexey as they searched for young women,
typically between the ages of 13 and 20, to present to agencies in Moscow and potentially
abroad.
Scouts, like all good detectives, dont always know where to look until they find
what it is they are looking for (Stark 2009). They deliberately cast the widest net
possible, spreading their attention on the metro and at music festivals, and shopping
malls, and scouring remote villages and town centers all across Siberiaat ten time
zones wide, it takes considerable investments of time and movement for scouts to sort
through fresh faces. It could be on the street, any street, necessitating constant vigilance.
One scout terms this wild scouting, and likens the search for game in the wilderness.
Scouts can also tap into a network of satellite agencies in remote towns and cities, setting
up appointments to meet girls. Finally scouts set up organized model contests in small
towns in attempt to draw out all of the girls in the area, or they go to organized local
beauty contests to search among the contestants. This is what recently brought me to the
Miss Ekaterinburg beauty pageant in Russia, where Alexey was looking for new faces:

25

The afternoon before the pageant competition, Alexey has organized a casting for
all of the contestants, held in a large mirrored room, the kind built for ballet
practice. I sit on the sidelines with my translator, Pasha, himself a former
assistant to organizers of a major model contest in Russia. Alexey stands in the
center of the room, before a line of 18 girls wearing bikinis, having been told to
change from their regular clothes. They step before him, one by one, practiced
and ready to state basic biographical information into his video recorder: Hello,
my name is---. Im --- years old. Im from ---. He pauses the filming to instruct
all of the girls on posing for snapshots: hand on hip, one leg bent at the knee, back
tall and straightshot from the front, sides, and back. The girls laugh and
practice posing together in the mirrored walls. Occasionally Alexey sets his
camera aside, pulls out a measuring tape, and wraps it around some part of a girls
body. Pasha whispers to me, Theres nothing here, as Alexey continues to
carefully teach, photograph, and videotape each girl.

Over the course of the next two days, Alexey would visit the five local modeling agencies
of Ekaterinburg, talking and taping anywhere from five to ten girls in each office, usually
a dimly lit room in a squat office building in the city center. Pasha and Alexey were
silent about their assessment of most of them, and only one time did Pasha whisper to me,
when a girl has finished with pictures and video, She can work. He later explained that
this particular girl was an obvious model: tall and lanky, with a symmetrical face and
proportionate body. Alexey spent a bit more time with particular girls. If he found a face

26

and body that seemed right for fashion, he would then try to make her laugh on tape, or
make a funny face, by offering jokes and riddles. A few girls he asked to dance, and he
pulled up pop tunes on his smartphone while a girl emitted an embarrassed laugh and
proceeded to dance under the gaze of his camera in front of everyone in the room,
including me and my translator Pasha. He kept the casting room fun and seemed to enjoy
engaging the girls. He asked about their lives, their interests, just to see, he explained,
how they interact. For the few young women in whom Alexey sees modeling potential,
his tricks are intended to elicit their personality, he tells me later, so he can show
evidence to agents of her potential. Most scouts agree that they can tell within a few
moments of meeting a girl if they want to take her on, but crucially, they must meet her in
person.
Scouts are in many ways preparing models for the barrage of personality
assessments they are likely to come across as they meet clients. The search for
personality cues manifest in all kinds of tricks of the casting trade: one client explained
how watches models on the elevator security cameras as they change shoes from sneakers
to high-heels, just to see their natural mannerisms and how they carry themselves. At
castings, I came to expect audition sheets soliciting information like hobbies or likes.
At one point during Fashion Week, I filled out the following questions to include on my
composite card for clients: Your perfect night..... Soundtrack of your life...... your
inspiration..... and so on. At one casting, models were asked to fill out a typical
information form including name, age, agency, as well as favorite color, favorite band,
do you play an instrument, and do you like modeling. In this instance, I asked the
casting director what they do with all of this seemingly trivial information, to which she

27

replied: Its just to get a sense of the person, if theyre a good fit with us. Its about a
vibe.
Like the cultural fit between job candidates and interviewers in the hiring
process (Rivera 2013), models are chosen in part because they resonate with taste. This
resonance can be observed as the presence of heightened emotions, and objects can
trigger it (McDonnell 2013, this issue). Objects like clothes have a character or a mood
that clients seek to convey in their choice of models as well. Many show fittings are
called Fit to Confirm, which gives the client the right to release a model if it turns out
that in the final line up of girls and outfits, one body is not fitting with the whole of the
collection.
A spatial and temporal arrangement of things and people can trigger a sense of
excitement or affect (Wissinger 2007) in something so seemingly mundane as a girl
walking in one outfit as opposed to a different girl or different garment. For example, at
one Fashion Week show casting:

I walk in and a young woman is modeling a dress to two older Italian women,
who shower her with praise. I stand against the wall in the cluttered design studio
while they excitedly speak to each other, and to her, and ask her to try on a
multitude of outfits and walk the length of the room and back. Each new outfit
makes them more delighted than the last. They are almost completing each
others sentences: I love her. Everything looks so good on her because she is so
elegant. And Yes, she is perfect, we have to have her, we have to fight to have
her [in our show]! The two women watched with smiles as the young model

28
departed. I am up next. Hello, I say, and stand before them in a vacuum of
sound. They are silent while they look at me with tight smiles. They quickly flip
through my portfolio in silence. Can you walk? I walk the length of the room
down and back, and upon return, my closed book was waiting for me in an
outstretched arm: Thank you Ashley, thank you for coming.

In this instance, the sense of a models appropriateness ricocheted between the two
clients, the model, and the clothing. This flow of energy is situational, and contingent on
the specific configuration of body-personality-garment. One body works while another
one doesnt. When its not working, the excitement lulls in a palpable way. Silence is a
telling form of communication, and in this casting, it was clear to me and to the
designers that I did not fit their collection. I had scribbled in my notebook after the
encounter: Heres the weird thing, they didnt even say anything to each other, its like
everyone in the room just at once agreed silently to not have me try anything on.
Cultural sociology, inspired by research among STS scholars, seeks to document
how objects mediate action, and how interactions between materiality and bodies shape
interpretation (Acord 2010; Griswold et al. 2013). For instance, in her work on
mediation among art curators, Acord documents the subtle ways that artistic knowledge
emerges through interactions between artists, curators, and the art in particular spaces
not just abstract social space like a Bourdieusian field, but in the actual space of a
museum room or a design studio. Art curators, like fashion intermediaries and other
professional tastemakers, arrive at aesthetic decisions by way of sensing this interactional
resonance. Because perception is both material and cognitive, aesthetic deliberation

29

involves the cognitive awareness of what other people want and expect, as well as
interpretations of material things.
While measuring the causal power of physical objects and bodies in interaction
may be beyond the reach of ethnography, participant observation certainly demonstrates
the important role of objects in mediating action and orienting meaning. Ethnography
enables observations of resonance in action, and it captures the salience of emotion in
meaning-making processes.
Ethnographic sight brings into focus those dimensions of incipient taste that are
hinted at in interviews, like the sensory dimensions of personality and its contingent
meaning in an interactions with materials. Personality becomes fleshed out as an
interactional capacity, which makes the look resonate via face-to-face encounters. This
interactive nature captures what sociologists of culture have documented as a shared
sense of craftsmanship among professional collaborators (Becker 1982) or what Eliasoph
and Lichtermann (2003) call group styles that are communicated through interaction.
However, ethnography obscures our vision of status and hierarchy that which network
analysis had neatly mapped out. By keeping the attention on the micro, interactional
components of taste, we have a view of culture as interactive knowledge, bound by an
analytic lens that frames culture within practices.

The Fourth Method: Observant Participation

30
The capacity to identify some girls as really good constitutes a particular way of

seeing, both abstract social space of the field and concrete physical space in situated
interaction. The mechanisms of transmitting this taste may not be observable to
outsiders, but rather felt by insiders. Bourdieu argued that in order to make taste
distinctions, people subconsciously draw from embodied knowledge and habituated
practices, routines, and taken-for-granted competencies, all of which are learned over
time through practice in the body (1984).
To access such acculturation and habituation, sociologists can undertake close
studies of habitus to show how particular ways of knowing and seeing are learned and
embodied, for instance in Desmonds auto-ethnography of firefighting (2007) or
OConnors self-mastery of glass blowing (2005). Every ethnographer tries to get a grasp
on the everyday reality experienced by the people they study. Above and beyond taking
seriously their subjects point of view, some also deploy what Wacquant describes as
an ethnography experiment, in which the researchers body comes to grasp in vivo
through his own flesh and bloodand then reflecting critically on the transformations of
itthe collective construction of the schemata that organize his subjects perception and
values (2009). Beyond participant observation, Wacquant calls this observant
participation or carnal sociology; habitus here is both theory and methodological tool
(2004, p. 6; 2011). Through deep immersion in their field sites, researchers should be
able to pick up and learn these embodied dispositions.
In my own time in the field, I began to develop a carnal knowledge of fashion, so
much so that my gait, my dispositions, and my comfort in my own skin changed to orient
with those of my subjects. I could see changes in the way I read magazines; like bookers,

31

I did less actual reading of them than scanning the images, beginning with the back
editorial spreads, as this is where stylists and models names and agencies are listed. I
saw it in the way I walked, which was something I had long been practicing and studying.
I practiced with training; a catwalk coach spent hours critiquing my walk along with two
other young women, and by the end I had bloodied my Achilles heel in stilettos, but in
just a few months with regular wear, I could slip the shoes off and on as easily as I could
adjust into a fashion walk. Clients frequently ask models to modify how they walk for a
specific show. Like the look, a walk should be both individually unique and flexible to
fit the feel of the collection. At show castings, models are asked to understand and
perform the right gait: this walk is fast and boyish, says one casting director, while
another wants a walk that is very feminine. I started to recognize a good walk in other
models; and I began to see which cadence of gait suited which designers. Day by day, I
was getting the hang of the rules of the game, right into my movements.
This process of bodily restructuration was also evident in my changing
relationship to clothing, another site for the materiality of objects to mediate meaning.
On casting days, and even days when I was off from work, I agonized over what to wear.
The clothing should be edgy, like my look, but it should convey traits of my personality
as well, and above all it should make me look thin like a model. When wearing clothing
that did not work on these levels, I felt inadequate, and was more likely to think that
others saw me this way as well:

Walking into my agency today, Im anxious. Im wearing tight jeans that arent
the most flattering, actually its uncomfortable. My booker gives me two quick

32
glances down my body and says nothing, no compliment of my style like she
sometimes offers. Its the smallest of gestures but I recognize it and it stings.
Perhaps shes even done it deliberately to signal something to me.

Here the observant participants measurement tools are self-reflexive field notes, which
measure a distance of researchers former and current self and body. I could sense better
and better with each casting if I fit with the field and with the clients felt sense for the
right looks, because I could feel it too.
Taking on the dispositions of scouts, bookers, and clients proved more difficult.
When scouting with scouts, I can usually predict their choices in a casting room full of
contenders. I am rarely surprised by their choices, even if an edgy skinny teenage look
grows further away from the kinds of people I see on a day-to-day basis. I can make
evaluations fairly quickly among a pile of similar-looking girls. However, I cannot tell
you precisely how I do this. My own habitus was changing throughout my time in the
field in ways I could recognize, if not operationalize. If asked, But, Ashley, how do you
know, I would return full circle to the beginnings of this essay, and reply: I just know.
Proclamations of intuition like, I know it when I see it, capture little underlying
motivation, but such statements are completely honest as phenomenological descriptions
of processes of judgment (Vaisey 2009, p. 1695). Researches can tap into and share in
the production of meanings through observant participation, emphasizing culture as
embodied and tacit knowledge. Tacit understandings are accrued through practice, and
through experience, we arrive at cultural meanings.

33

Conclusions

The problem of arriving upon incipient taste among cultural producersand

fashion producers in particularcan be answered in multiple ways, and each method sets
a frame around how researchers see culture. Methods are a type of optical device in that
they shape our ways of knowing and understanding the social world.
Interviews provide narrative accounts of what people do and why, but in these
accounts, people offer post-hoc justifications for action, which may be misrecognized as
internalized schemas, thus we mistake rationalizations for motivations (Vaisey 2009).
Partly this is because knowledge is far from coherent, and we move through a world of
meaning that rarely makes one sense. Articulating why one knows something may be an
unreasonable demand to make in an interview. Furthermore, this research finds that in
interviews, people also talk over the interactional aspects of their work, misrecognizing
collective processes as individual talent. Rather than assume such contradictions are a
measurement problem, we can take them as observations in themselves. By providing a
forum for tastemakers to confirm the strength of their eyes and signal their professional
competence, interviews tell us what people value and what they want to like, and not like.
While interviews suggest taste emerges from a set of internalized norms and
personal capacities, network analysis frames taste along status hierarchies and
information exchange. Network analysis accounts for how taste structured in a field,
based on mechanisms that can be verified in the interviews, like the importance of seeing
the field with options mechanisms. With a macro picture of the field, however, we miss

34

the nuance of what happens in face-to-face meetings, so crucial for clients and agents to
size up models. An empirical strength of ethnography is to access situated behavior to
see how people actually behave (Jerolmack and Khan 2013). Ethnography allows for the
interpretive contingency of situations, and each casting opens a new set of possible
arrangements of bodies, personalities, and garments, and this choreography of action is
something ethnographers can observe in practice (Griswold et al. 2013).
Carnal ethnography can further describe the development of the fashion habitus.
While carnal ethnography exposes researchers to practical and prediscursive embodied
sense, they may find themselves arriving at that familiar inability to articulate how it
works. By turning their bodies into the field, researchers can tell us that meaning comes
from corporeality and materiality (OConnor 2005). This is yet one more partial account
that can and should be offered alongside others.
Having an eye for the future of fashion is simultaneously an act of seeing and of
understanding a field at the macro levela whole system aesthetic possibilities and status
hierarchies in fashionand at the micro level, in the interactional and corporeal sense of
resonance. From interviews to network analysis to ethnography and auto-ethnography,
we come full circle to the puzzle of incipient taste, which is, I concede, here only
partially and cautiously answered. Across each method, new ambiguities emerge: how
do we measure personality, or habitus, or resonance? These things do not lend
themselves to easy operationalization or even articulation, yet they are central to the
problem at hand. Each of these different methods, as an optical device, gives the
researcher a particular and complementary window to examine taste, and by extension,
each method renders a certain way to see culture.

35

Acknowledgements: Thanks to John Mohr and Amin Ghaziani for organizing the
Measuring Culture Conference at the University of British Columbia in October 2012,
and to all of the enthusiastic participants. Thanks to Frederic Godart, Thomas Franssen,
Terrence McDonnell, Japonica Brown-Saracino, Iddo Tavory, and Alex van Venrooij for
valuable comments on previous drafts of this paper.

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