London Fashion week - our resources on the economics of fashion

London Fashion Week took place this week 
Here are some recommended resources on the economics of fashion.

What is the economic value of the fashion Industry?

The ‘Value of the UK Fashion Industry’ report, commissioned by the British Fashion Council, estimated the total value as 26 billion in 2014. Download the full text of the report from the website to see details of the methodology used. 

The UK government also has some more broader creative industry estimates from January 2015.

The Economist magazine also has some recent articles on fashion.

For  the USA see this analysis

The cost of fashion to the global workforce.

However campaigners have raised concerns about conditions and wages amongst workers producing clothes for the fashion industry. Has the rise of fast fashion led to further declines in the developing world. what is the cost of fashion to the workforce. The ILO website has some recent discussion of this. Other useful websites include those of campaign groups seeking to expose conditions.

War on Want regularly organises campaigns against sweatshops. see this posting for London fashion week.

Labour behind the label supports garment workers its website has reports and guides on the real conditions for  garment workers 

Clean Clothes has some shocking facts on conditions and wages

The Institute for Global Labour and Human Right resources - this is is a non-profit human rights organization dedicated to the promotion and defense of internationally recognized worker rights in the global economy

What do selfies say about personality?

In 2014, The Pew Research Centre  that more than 1 Million American 18-34 year-olds had shared selfies. Rates declined for older users.

But what do taking selfies and the types taken say about personality type?


A recent study by Qiu, L., Lu, J., Yang, S., Qu, W., & Zhu, T. (2015). What does your selfie say about you? published in Computers in Human Behavior, 52, 443-449 DOI:
summarised in the BPS Digest surveyed over a 100 Sina Weibo users examining the backgrounds, images and poses to consider whether selfies can provide insight into extroversion, introversion and narcissm.Ultimately it found that viewers of the photographs were not able to make firm opinions about personality types.

Rather interesting Fox, J., & Rooney, M. C. (2015). The Dark Triad and trait self-objectification as predictors of men’s use and self-presentation behaviors on social networking sites. published in  Personality & Individual Differences, 76, 161-165. doi: 10.1016/j.paid.2014.12.017. Summarised in Psychology Today.
(LSE Link to journal.) examined men who post and edit selfies online and found high percentage  had  narcissistic and self-obsession personality traits.
Other recent research on photosharing amongst acquaintances on Facebook  from David Houghton et al (2013). found that it could have a negative impact on relationships
Likewise a recent study from Oregon State University found that women who shared revealing photographs of themselves online were viewed negatively by their peers.
For some more suggested academic resources on the psychology of selfies. See our 2014 posting.