Do I look right? De-familiarizing the organizational fashioning of the body

• Management and organization studies need to theorize ‘organizational fashion’.
• Pre-theoretical exploratory writing is initially required for this.
• Fashion is a multi-dimensional, spatial phenomenon.
• Fashion reveals the connection between the organization and ‘the city’.
• New theoretical contexts are enabled, generating new questions.

SummaryIn this exploratory study, we use fashion as a means of opening our understanding to how the informal, seemingly random and ‘taken for granted’ task of clothing oneself belies a series of processes internal to the economy of organizational life. While fashion is not an established object of research in management and organization studies, we use the concept of fashion as an heuristic in defining the various ways in which the body, in the process of sensory and self-reflective presentation (dressing), is significant in understanding certain forms of organizational ‘knowing’. We explore this as a yet undefined area of organizational study by using the art methodology of ‘defamiliarization’. Appropriate to this methodology, we structure our study of fashion in terms of ‘experience’, ‘language’ and ‘knowledge’. Each of these, and the intrinsic relation between them, breach the conventional boundaries of management and organization studies in productive ways.