On the economic-cultural exchanges between "global north" and "global south" in the world market of fashion: The globalization of the "Brazilian fashion"

Drawing on a field research conducted in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Paris between the years of 2008 and 2011, this thesis aims to comprehending the new economic and symbolic exchanges established in the world market of fashion. The analysis of "partnerships" set up by so-called "Franco-Brazilian" fashion brands allows us to elucidate current relationships between two types of actors, which have been built as "ideal types" of Weberian inspiration. We try to understand some reciprocal and hierarchical borrowings of legitimacy between, on the one hand, “mobile actors”, related to the “Global North” and which operate in the market with their "capital of globality" and, on the other hand, “fixed actors”, bounded to the “Global South” and whose condition of insertion in the global scene is sustained by their "capital of diversity". In a social situation where both mobility and diversity become values ​​in the global market of symbolic goods, the mobile actors search for the fixed actors’ diversity, while these need the mobile actors’ mobility to echo at a global level. However, although these exchanges meet mutual interests, they tend to be hierarchical and unequal in the sense that the later can manage the diversity of the former, which are prone to become restricted to their geo-symbolic belongings.