The fashion business is big business, especially if you consider not just sales of clothing but also the magazines and TV shows, billboards and blogs, logistics, design, accessories – in short, the whole supply chain and the related markets. This shouldn't be surprising as both having something to wear and dressing decoratively to enhance one's status and effectiveness are pretty fundamental human needs, close behind food and shelter. So I was pleased to see Patrik Asper's book Orderly Fashion: A Sociology of Markets.

Of course, sociologists should be encouraged to take a look at all markets – I'm sure we all look forward to reading 'Chaos and testosterone: a sociology of financial trading'. But fashion markets are especially interesting because, well, there are fashions. Twice a year or more consumers have to be induced to buy another set of clothes, and the global supply chain and logistics have become enormously sophisticated at delivering the latest seasons fashions with just a few weeks' lead time.

Aspers looks at the ways in which order is brought to this constant change. He focuses on the role of 'branded garment retailers' such as Zara and Top Shop, and distinguishes two kinds of fashion market, the standard market and the 'status' market (haute couture and designers' diffusion/ready-to-wear ranges). In status
markets,  the identities of the deisgners and celeb purchases rather than the quality of the goods orders the market, whereas in standard markets
the opposite holds true, quality determines desirability and pricing.

It's interesting for an economist to think about the role of social relations in constructing the menu of quality-price combinations from which consumers select, and indeed to realise that quality and price needn't always be positively correlated. Quality and other intangible aspects of competition (such as service) are taken into account in applied economics – for example, in competition inquiries – but in a bit of a theoretical vacuum. The concept of product differentiation doesn't fully capture all of the dimensions which shoppers clearly take into account.

The book has a lot of interesting detail on how the fashion business works, particularly in the big retail chains. As with other works of sociology, I'd much rather have had a more journalistic version than the full academic monty, complete with references to Georg Simmel and Edmund Husserl; but Aspers writes quite well for a sociologist. And I love the cover image.