The Perfect Fit - by Claudio E Benzecry (Paperback)

About the Book

"Much of what we see and imagine in the high-profile world of luxury shoes is all glamour--stylish men and women scouting and displaying trends we never imagined but rave over once discovered. But a shoe is a commodity, and the elite world of fashion design must work hand-in-glove with the factories that produce innovative footware. In The Global Shoe, Claudio Benzecry gives us an in-depth look at the shoe industry, showing how all the people who contribute to shoe production, from jet-setting trend spotters to factory floor laborers, are engaged in the enterprise of fashion design, and that even the most logistical types of knowledge contribute to this creative act. First are the trendspotters, who make use of expensive shoe trend databases. Then come the designers, who fly around the world buying as many shoes as they can before sketching up new designs inspired by these fashions. Top candidates are sent, along with detailed instructions about materials, to China so that a prototype can be made. But that's not the end of the story. Once a prototype has been made, it has to be tested on real feet. Enter the fit girl. These are women with just the right size and shape feet who test and model shoes. They are far more powerful than you would imagine, however. A shoe design cannot be approved if a fit model declares a shoe too uncomfortable. Only after they've given the stamp of approval does a shoe go on to production. Working with designers, the fit girls and factory managers strategize about how to edit a design to get the fit, materials, and look just right. Ultimately, Benzecry uncovers that the global production of commodities is not so divided as we usually think, with the intellectual labor of design taking place in the first world and the manual labor of production in the developing world. Rather, the work of making a shoe from start to finish requires a global movement of ideas and expertise"--

Book Synopsis

The Perfect Fit shows us how globalization works through the many people and places involved in making women's shoes.

We know a lot about how clothing and shoes are made cheaply, but very little about the process when they are made beautifully. In The Perfect Fit, Claudio E. Benzecry looks at the craft that goes into designing shoes for women in the US market, revealing that this creative process takes place on a global scale. Based on unprecedented behind-the-scenes access, The Perfect Fit offers an ethnographic window into the day-to-day life of designers, fit models, and technicians as they put together samples and prototypes, showing how expert work is a complement to and a necessary condition for factory exploitation.

Benzecry looks at the decisions and constraints behind how shoes are designed and developed, from initial inspiration to the mundane work of making sure a size seven stays constant. In doing so, he also fosters an original understanding of how globalization works from the ground up. Drawing on five years of research in New York, China, and Brazil, The Perfect Fit reveals how creative decisions are made, the kinds of expertise involved, and the almost impossible task of keeping the global supply chain humming.

Review Quotes

"Conceptualizing the making of shoes not only as a global craft, but also as part of crafting the global, The Perfect Fit
provides relevant insights and substantially furthers conversations in the sociology of fashion, work and occupations, globalization, cultural and economic sociology, and world society."-- "Contemporary Sociology"

"The Perfect Fit is a fascinating exploration of what the global is, how it is done, and perhaps more interestingly--at least for this reader--how it is undone. Writing a book about globalization in this day and age may seem a daring proposition, especially when taking into consideration the tsunami of publications on the topic that we have been subjected to over the last couple of decades. And yet, The Perfect Fit manages to offer us something genuinely new. Benzecry achieves this by skillfully inverting the perspective through which the study of the global has usually taken place. Rather than approaching it from the top down, we are invited to do so from the bottom up. This inversion allows Benzecry to explore a host of moments, actors, locations, forms of labor, and practices that have typically been absent from analyses of globalization."-- "European Journal of Sociology"

"Benzecry provides an illuminating and surprising account of what it takes for ordinary shoes to be designed and to take shape. In doing so, Benzecry makes important contributions to the sociology of globalization, the sociology of knowledge, and, even though he does not claim this contribution himself, to what one may call the sociology of the mundane."-- "American Journal of Sociology"

"The Perfect Fit is a strong contribution to the literature on creative work, globalization, and the production of knowledge. And one, I think, that is well worth the read."
-- "International Sociology"

"Hand in hand with a sociology of culture focused on the material, which dialogues with the social studies of science and technology, the sociology of knowledge, and a look at the global embodied in concrete processes and in areas of 'friction, ' The Perfect Fit shows us a provocative look at two issues dear to capitalism: the logic of commodities and the problem of creativity."
-- "Papeles de Trabajo"

"The Perfect Fit will be an excellent piece of global ethnography of work and global production. While the author classifies The Perfect Fit as materiality-centered cultural sociology, it goes beyond particular disciplinary boundaries, encompassing at least labor studies, economy sociology, cultural sociology, and industrial sociology."

-- "Social Forces"

"Sometimes it only takes a change of perspective to see the world afresh. And this is what The Perfect Fit offers. Looking at globalization from the humble point of view of the right feet of shoe models in China, Benzecry masterfully reveals the myriad of actors, miniscule transactions and daily practices required to make global scale fit into a shoe. Through a riveting ethnographic description of how shoes are put together, the book reveals the invisible threads binding the fates of designers in New York, small shoe shops in Italy, and abandoned factories in Brazil. The result is not merely a book about how shoes are done, but also a powerful and timely reflection about the many lives, hopes, and spaces that are caught up, as well as left behind, in the process."--Fernando Domínguez Rubio, author of 'Still Life Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum'

"The Perfect Fit is a brilliant ethnography of the global economy that focuses on the shoe. It is a sweeping but intimate portrait of commodity chains, in which shoes inhabit ecologies of aesthetic judgment and material practice that span the world. The shoe serves in this book as primary informant and guide, leading both Benzecry and the reader through regimes of material creativity and social destruction. It provides shocking insight into the anxiety, ambition and anguish at the heart of globalization."--Chandra Mukerji, University of California, San Diego

"Individuation and standardization; the local and the global; matters of subjective taste and matters of objective measurement; the things you probably don't care much about and the thing-makers that care so much about your taste. Benzecry treats each of these evident oppositions within the same frame, and he puts globalization on the firmest of footings."--Steven Shapin, author of 'The Scientific Life and A Social History of Truth'

About the Author

Claudio E. Benzecry is associate professor of communication studies and sociology (by courtesy) at Northwestern University. He is the author of The Opera Fanatic: Ethnography of an Obsession and the coeditor of Social Theory Now, also published by the University of Chicago Press.