‘Scatter my ashes at Saks Fifth Avenue’: Boundary work and intermediation in the fashion landscape
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Past research shows that intermediaries exercise a significant amount of authority and power in cultural fields. In this article, I investigate the case of cultural intermediaries who might appear to have a deficit of power and authority. Stylists and visual merchandisers in luxury fashion cater to elite clients who possess high levels of cultural and economic capital. How do these cultural intermediaries mobilize their cultural capital and expertise to bridge the social boundaries between themselves and their elite clients? Drawing on 17 in-depth interviews and 30 site visits, I find that stylists and visual merchandisers rely on a set of place-based and affective techniques for mobilizing their capital. The case of luxury fashion highlights the role of place in cultural intermediary work and the variation in how intermediaries generate and deploy authority and expertise to bridge social boundaries with consumers of fashion.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it