Negotiating Aesthetic and Emotional Labor: Taste Work by Black Fashion Designers for Their Clients in Johannesburg

ABSTRACT: This article studies how style, taste, and “quality” are negotiated during meetings between Black fashion designers and their bespoke mid-market clients in Johannesburg. It views the parties to the negotiation as embedded in a broader socioeconomic context, arguing that the meetings imply and have implications to participants’ status. The Black fashion designer field only appeared at the turn of the twentieth century in the wake of the post-apartheid opening of occupational spaces for previously marginalized peoples. These societal transformations also led to growth in demand for designer services among those who aspire to or are experiencing upward social mobility in the public or the private sectors. The article employs and redefines the concepts of “aesthetic labor,” “emotional labor,” and “taste work” to analyze clients’ and designers’ efforts at creating “fitting” “solutions” for the clients’ desire to “shine” in various social settings. Simultaneously, in shaping styles for their customers and themselves, the designers strengthen their position as experts with the talent and authority to make aesthetic judgments. The article adds to the literature on aesthetic labor and taste work a view from a context in which the social structure is in greater flux than in many of the contexts in the Global North that are the focus of existing research. It argues that the long-term European influence in South African society and dress codes remains observable in the designers’ judgement on appropriate styles for mid-market or middle-stratum people, although their admittance of subtle individualizing or Africanizing references does speak of and enact slight shifts in the codes. Finally, the article aims to shows that rather than an inherent property of an object, “quality” is an interactionally produced valuation entangled with considerations of taste, class, and gender as well as the historicity of aesthetic codes.