The present article intends to trace an outline of the field of fashion just as its constituted today in Brazil. The main reference utilized was the city of São Paulo. It presumes that the sense of fashion should be searched beyond of its convencional ways of presentation, as fashion shows and specialized magazines. It is in the relationship that consumers, creators and opinion formers have with the clothes and its constant renewal. The sense of fashion is in the fact that clothes mean something, and that meaning, besides differing in function to the researched group and its position inside the social structure, registers and guides different conducts for those several groups. There are four different interests (demands) involving the use of the clothes, and each one of them registers a particular sense for such, establishing different norms for the use, classification and judgement of value. In other words, different convictions of "what for" and "how" should be the correct or proper use of clothes and, therefore, the creation. It determines a conflict between the groups (consumers, creators and opinion formers) that, at the same time gives form to the field of fashion, it determines one own business dinamic: the securancy of its work and the increasing specialization of each part - creators and opinion formers - is in the impossibility of resolution of this conflict.
cultural study; consumption; fashion