This special issue investigates the relationship between aesthetics and morality. How do the good and the beautiful, the bad and the ugly, happen in everyday life? How do these 'orders of worth' interact? Do they reinforce each other? What happens when they contradict one another? Does one order typically trump the other? Five contributions, from Israel, Italy and the Netherlands, scrutinize different sites where both aesthetics -the continuum of evaluations from beautiful to ugly -and morality -evaluations about good and evil, right and wrong -have a strong presence. The contributions zoom in on everyday cultural consumption, where people create, seek out and discuss 'good' food, clothing, films and architecture, and professional situations where people look for 'good' jobs, want to work in 'good' work spaces and aim to be a 'good' worker. Integrating insights from cultural studies, sociology, valuation studies and science and technology studies, this special issue shows, first, how judgments of aesthetic and moral value are central to the fabric of social life -from the smallest level of everyday interactions to the large scale of economic relations and power im/balances. Second, these valuations often clash, blend and blur. This blurring and blending enables the drawing of social boundaries, the Article 384 European Journal of Cultural Studies 22(4) consolidation of identities and the shaping of selves. But it also allows for seduction, manipulation and obfuscation of power dynamics. Third, the contributions show that in contemporary post-Fordist, meritocratic consumer societies, beauty and morality are increasingly entangled with economic and political logics, leading to new social struggles and new forms of alienation and exploitation.

This paper investigates the relation between food, the body and morality in fashion modelling. More than has been recognized so far, eating is a continuous form of body work that is decidedly essential to aesthetic labour. Against the backdrop of slender aesthetics, models are purposefully socialized into remaining or becoming slender, through food beliefs inducing them to eat in specific ways. Food is classified into good and bad categories, and believed to affect male and female bodies differently. But other than to aesthetics or gender, considering ‘what (not) to eat’ links to morality, enabling models to draw symbolic boundaries between themselves and others. These show two main moral imperatives: models should eat controlled and effortlessly. Solving this moral paradox, models normalize and conceal controlled eating. Ultimately, the fashion modelling food system preoccupies models with self-surveillance and reinforces power inequalities between models and other professionals.

This article unravels the process of objectification by empirically examining a social context where it occurs almost incessantly: fashion modeling. Drawing on an ethnography of fashion modeling in Amsterdam, Paris and Warsaw, I argue that objectification is neither ubiquitous nor one-dimensional: it takes place in specific social contexts and unfolds itself differently under different social conditions. Moreover, objectification is not unidirectional: it is done by and happens to both men and women. By taking an experiential perspective which involves models' subjective responses to being objectified, I call into question theoretical arguments of objectification pertaining to disempowered subjects, and the assumption that objectification is inherently negative or immoral. Instead, I argue that objectification is socially rooted in institutions and specific situations and that this matters considerably for its varying forms, levels of intensity and the emotional and practical responses it evokes in people. This does not imply that objectification is less compelling as a process, or easy to avoid. Objectification might be all the more effective exactly because the process is embedded in different social contexts, and adapts itself accordingly.

This article analyzes the creation of value in (semi-)peripheral fields, using interview (N=94) and ethnographic data of creatives, models and cultural intermediaries in Polish and Dutch fashion. Drawing on field theory and center-periphery theories we show that these peripheral fields have a distinct structure—peripheral worlds—marked by the dependence on foreign centers for goods, standards and consecration, in which actors employ field-specific peripheral strategies for pursuing value and success. Workers in the (semi-)periphery develop peripheral selves, marked by a “double consciousness”, simultaneously seeing themselves from a local perspective and through the eyes of “central” others. We theorize “peripheralness” as a dimension of social inequality, a continuum ranging from “most central” to “most peripheral”, that spring from transnational interdependencies; and offer building blocks for a theory of the periphery that connects structural conditions and personal experiences. This theory explains, among others, why peripheries are not the reverse of centers, why centers also need peripheries (though not as much as peripheries need centers), and why peripheral and semi-peripheral actors don’t leave for cultural hubs to “make it there”.

Based on ethnographic and interview data collected in the modeling industries of Amsterdam, Paris, and Warsaw, this article shows that the relation between work, body, and self is particularly fraught for fashion models, as they work in a "greedy" industry that demands intensive forms of aesthetic labor. Such aesthetic labor requires models to continuously reinvent and negotiate their selves in different contexts. Fashion models make great effort to justify and maintain a coherent self, through enacting different forms of "good modelhood"-natural, healthy, and pragmatic modelhood, which are interpreted as modes of justification. These forms of modelhood all relate differently to the dominant aesthetic logic of fashion modeling and, consequently, bear different degrees of legitimacy within the field. By focusing on fashion models' subjective experiences of aesthetic labor in relation to their selves, this article contributes to existing sociological perspectives on the body, showing how the body connects to morality and selfhood in European cultural and institutional contexts.