Fad Phobia: The (D)evolution of the American Fashion Industry and the Revolutionary Potentials of the Market

This thesis engages Pierre Bourdieu's theory of the autonomous cultural field to map fashion's unruly departure from a sanctioned hierarchy of cultural production and its current manifestation as the amorphous result of spontaneous and unorganized mass motions. Ultimately, through the work of Jean-Christophe Agnew on the cultural phenomenology of the market and Leo Bersani on the queer sociability of cruising, I uncover the revolutionary potentials of market and money form that have gone overlooked by Marxist theory and that have sparked defensive and revealing retreat from liberal structures of control and subjection.