Un-Dress: Stories of Ethical Fashion Entrepreneuring

This dissertation investigates ethical fashion businesses through studying the narrations and performances of the founder-entrepreneurs. The main purpose is to explore the interplay between design of clothing, self, organization and society and to figure out how to reveal those dynamics. To examine what this interplay looks like, a social-relational, affirmative approach is adopted that views entrepreneuring as a practice of creatively connecting and fashioning history, rather than a reasoned exercise of gathering facts and assets. To answer the how, the study adopts a mixed-method approach of combining a narrative/discursive analysis with a multi-sensorial ethnography. Through philandering with these theoretical and methodological positions, the study offers two distinct perspectives to venturing in the ethical fashion industry. First, the premise of embodied multi-discursivity is that discourses become materialized through practices at the interface of entrepreneuring and design of self. Embodied multi-discursivity makes visible how multi-discursive processes of entrepreneuring come into being, how they are interrupted and how they can break into a duality that ignores the variety of discourses. Second, the study looks how we can conceptualize entrepreneuring as a folding/un-folding of practices of ethico-aesthetic self-styling interconnecting the styling of self, fashion, enterprise and society at large. Both perspectives can lead to a more comprehensive understanding of the emancipatory potential of entrepreneuring and the effects on fashioning history. Unique to the study is the insider perspective of the author who is an active participant and entrepreneur herself in the field of ethical fashion. Taken together, the study contributes to the entrepreneurship literature by empirically "testing' and expanding on the affirmative perspective to processes of entrepreneuring. It provides novel insights to (potential) entrepreneurs and adds to a more aesthetic understanding of entrepreneurship in which creativity and imagination play an essential role. Above all, this dissertation discloses an authentic account of the journey of becoming a scholar. It is a celebration of the dynamics of self in a changing society.