Success in cultural production markets like fashion modeling might on the surface appear to be a matter of blind luck or pure genius. But luck is never blind, nor does genius work alone. Behind every winner in a winner-take-all market there is a complex, organized production process. In this study, I show that fashion models are not simply discovered. They are made. This dissertation traces the production of value in fashion modeling markets to reveal an invisible world of work, collaboration, and calculation that goes into producing something many people take for granted as a natural state: beauty.

Models sell their "bodily capital," known as their "look," to fashion clients, and their agents broker the trade. The term "look" may sound like a fixed set of physical attributes, but looks are amenable outcomes of social processes, in which agents and models jointly attempt to develop and package the kinds of personalities and appearances they predict will be desired by clients. Amid market volatility and uncertainty, looks attain value through a convergence of practices: models' aesthetic labor, agents' recognition and promotion strategies, and clients' information-sharing and imitation of status. Working within the parameters of white bourgeois definitions of femininity and masculinity, agents and clients come into the market immersed in invisible prejudices that devalue non-white and male bodies relative to their white female counterparts. Through social interaction, each actor develops social ties and shared cultural understandings of value that enable economic exchange.

Utilizing theories of cultural production, this study situates the fashion modeling industry within the increasingly important cultural economy and its new forms of labor. This study takes fashion models seriously as workers and as cultural goods. In so doing, it furthers the sociological critique of neoclassical theories of market orders and shows the collaborative work and shared cultures of production underlying markets in cultural production. Ultimately this dissertation serves to show the complex social life that enables economic action in the cultural economy.