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Skjulstad and Morrison, Fashion Film and Genre Ecology
The Journal of Media Innovations 3.2 (2016) 30
The Journal of Media Innovations 3.2 (2016), 20-41.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5617/jmi.v3i2.2522
© Synne Skjulstad and David Morrison 2016.
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We analyse the challenges and changing charac-
ter, production and consumption of the emerging
genre fashion lm through a genre as ecology ap-
proach. This approach accounts for the complex-
ity of various rhetorical practices used within the
creative industries, such as fashion. We nd that
digital mediation compels genre innovation in
networked cultures in the mediation of fashion.
We examine three fashion lms to ascertain how
they function as cultural production within web-
and mobile-based communication and networked
articulations. These need to be understood as part
of distributed, polyvocal and multimodally medi-
ated digital branding and advertising strategies
that have largely not been addressed as genre by
media and communication studies. Genre ecology
is proposed as an addition to typological and de-
velopmental models of (media) genre innovation.
Andrew Morrison
Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO)
andrew.morrison@aho.no
Synne Skjulstad
Westerdals: Oslo School of Arts, Communication and
Technology
synne@westerdals.no
Keywords
Genre Ecology; Fashion mediation; Genre Innovation; Branding
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“Fashion lm” describes the emergence of short
digital lms on, with and about aspects of fashion,
from amateur productions to professional ones.
These lms transgress categories and genres and
contexts of cultural production and uptake. They
are woven into a wider network of mediated ar-
ticulations of fashion, which may be approached
as cultural innovations in terms of both media and
genre ecology. By examining fashion lm in such a
perspective, we argue that not only the lms, but
also the mesh of platforms, contexts and expres-
sions central to mediation of fashion in contempo-
rary branding and advertising might be understood
more fully. Such an approach makes it possible to
see fashion lm as not just adding extra layers of
meaning to a fashion brand; what may be appreci-
ated in this view is that genre is realised through
mediated social action (Shepherd & Miller, 2004)
that contributes to mediational innovation trans-
gressing more established genre boundaries.
Previous approaches to genre analysis, emerg-
ing later than those in literary studies, have been
predominantly textual and linguistically framed,
whether in lm studies or applied linguistics. They
have explored textual practices, typologies and
contexts of meaning production. A recent edited
collection (Artemeva & Freedman 2015) looking at
genre studies across the globe from within writing,
rhetoric and language studies argues that we need
to look beyond three main Anglophone traditions
concerning genre analysis. These were proposed by
Sunny Hyon (1996): English for Specic Purposes,
North American rhetoric approaches now called
Rhetorical Genre Studies, and the Sydney school of
genre studies framed in Systemic Functional Lin-
Skjulstad and Morrison, Fashion Film and Genre Ecology
The Journal of Media Innovations 3.2 (2016) 31
mediationally articulated, increasingly connected
to digitally distributed communication that is no
longer possible to process or analyse in terms of
textual forms, contextual detail or communicative
intent as earlier structuralist notions of genre at-
tempted. A genre ecology approach enables a dy-
namic view of the multimodal rhetorics that cur-
rently mediate digital branding and advertising
through fashion lm. Extending the notion of genre
to include ecology enables us to theorise how fash-
ion lm oscillates between conservative and the
more playful and artistic outside of reductive no-
tions of the scope or breadth of a narrowly demar-
cated genre. In investigating fashion lm as part
of a genre ecology, we may not only gain insight
into how fashion is mediated via and across mov-
ing images online; such a framing may also inform
further inquiry into how contemporary persuasive
media practices in the creative industries unfold in
and across digitally linked platforms and genres.
A genre ecology view thus enables us to incor-
porate a wider topography of related mediated
textual expressions in our understanding of fash-
ion lm as a genre that is distributed and realised
through digitally mediated social action (Miller &
Shepherd, 2004) but that is also emergent and de-
velopmental, slippery and transgressive as this is
its communicative status. This is precisely because
fashion lm does not aim to conform to a structur-
alist set of genre rules and characteristics or to a
mode of contextual genre realisation. Fashion lm
is understandable by virtue of its being a persuasive
and rhetorical articulation that emerges from with-
in a creative industry innovation within a mediated
ecology of genre. Such a view on genre opens out
communicative possibility by type while it conveys
genre rhetorically, and especially dispositionally.
It does so through poetic and discursive perfor-
mance that is realised contextually. Fashion lm is
articulated temporally and mediationally in an age
of web and social media, but also through uptake
and is thus ecologically complex and uid com-
municatively. It is not only realised as synchronic
form or diachronically. As Anne Freadman (2015:
Kindle edition) argues, “Genre is destabilised by
uptake even as it asserts its powers. Trapped out as
a theory that pins down language use, genre theory
is like a rabbit trap, designed to catch its quarry.
But nimble, fast-talking rabbits been known to get
away.” Fashion is notoriously ckle; our analysis
follows a selection of nimble or dynamic media in
fashion lm online. However, rather than attempt-
ing to denitively seize it analytically, we invite
readers to also access the web based productions
guistics. This categorisation has been widely dis-
cussed. Carolyn Miller’s notion of genre as social
action (1984) may be seen as a common thread.
However, as we show, genre may be approached
less about following denitional prescriptions and
pedagogical patterns for textual reproduction. It
may also be understood performatively, that is as
cultural production by way of motivated articula-
tion that in communication design terms reaches
towards new expression and modes of articula-
tion. As Miller argues (this volume) these may be
analysed by sets of components or essences or as
evolutionary but also in a “third way”: for us this
way also diers somewhat from the three language
located approaches to genre studies originating in
applied linguistics. As we argue below, a genre ecol-
ogy view is interdisciplinary, and in terms of media
innovations, it is multimodal and while emergent
and evolutionary, this view modies both earlier
notions of media ecology and genre as social action.
Recent work has motivated for a multimodal
and discursive approach to mediated communica-
tion, as composition, through co-creation and per-
formative enactment, whether in terms of strategic
or directive, poetic or performative articulation
(e.g. Morrison, 2010). In such views, genre may be
understood also as a broad set of discursive moves,
Skjulstad and Morrison, Fashion Film and Genre Ecology
The Journal of Media Innovations 3.2 (2016) 32
themselves and to experience the mesh of mediated
fashion lm in an ecologising of genre innovation.
Fashion and media innovation
As a domain of design and a signicant part of
global commerce, fashion oscillates between art,
industry and culture. Fashion is increasingly per-
ceived as playing an important role in culture. It
is seen as not just a parasitic entity, which draws
cultural credibility from the cultural elite, but as a
creative and generative force in cultural production
(Taylor, 2005) that is itself mediated. The fashion
industry, its art, artice, trends and promotion,
thrives because it engages with a variety and blend
of genres that are embedded in its own worn and
wearable artifacts. However, compared with half a
century ago, fashion is now increasingly present in
a diverse range of communicational settings and is
a mediated entity online in emerging digital genres.
Fashion appears in a range of formats such as short
online web lms (Muriale, 2014) and on socially
networked platforms such as blogs, Instagram and
Twitter (Kamais & Munt, 2010). Nested in a digital
media landscape in ux (Karaminas, 2012), the me-
diation of fashion is fundamentally distributed in
nature. As commercially intertwined with cultural
and artistic innovation and co-production in adver-
tising and branding, the mediation of fashion has
changed signicantly with the advancement of so-
cial networking platforms and services. How these
changing conditions for mediation are reected in
articulations of fashion as distributed moving im-
age, we argue, may analytically be grasped more
fully if investigated in terms of genre ecology as op-
posed to as isolated expressions.
As fashion is mediated across a range of media
types and genres, one major development has been
that fashion brands take on the role of patrons of
ne art (Ryan, 2007; Skjulstad, 2014). This is evi-
denced in how fashion brands commission large-
scale architectural projects in collaborations with
leading architects such as Frank Ghery, OMA and
Herzog & de Mauron, or establish art foundations
and museums. In terms of media commissions and
collaborations, fashion designers, fashion brands,
digital artists and lm makers show their works
on an extended, digitally mediated and distributed
catwalk and as part of this, fashion labels and oth-
er fashion industry actors take on moving images
in their mediational practices (Uhlirova, 2013a;
Uhlirova, 2013b; Khan, 2012; Muriale, 2014).
The term fashion lm, used by and grown
out of the fashion industry and circulated on line
(Uhlirova, 2013b) describes an emergent genre,
and as a mode of moving fashion photography that
captures and negotiates the alluring, poetic and, at
times, bizarre world of fashion. Fashion lm is a
complex genre we argue, in that it blends and bor-
rows a variety of genre elements and features from
other domains and weaves them into expressive
and projective mediations that are simultaneously
artistic and commercial. Fashion lm encapsulates
a spectrum of lm genres from traditional advertis-
ing lms, and music videos, to short experimental,
sometimes even abstract ones. While fashion itself
and its branding and popular cultural vibrancy “on
the street” have become increasingly implicated in
one another’s value chains, visibility, and circula-
tion eects (Kamais, 2010; Gaugele, 2014), fashion
lm is a meta-genre of sorts. It is at once a mixture
– selection and coalescence, static form and emer-
gent expression – of genres and elements of genres
that together undergird, wrap over and layer the
creative and the commercial. This layering involves
a range of dierent media, platforms, networks,
genres and contexts with opposing and at times
conicting value systems. Genre ecology makes it
possible to see this as more than context, but, as we
argue, it is also the layers that are are woven into
the very genre and its distributed articulations.
Skjulstad and Morrison, Fashion Film and Genre Ecology
The Journal of Media Innovations 3.2 (2016) 33
Fashion lm and genre
The genre of fashion lm interests us because it
is a mediated device for distributed branding, for
the digital generation of appetites and taste, and
for the circulation online of views of fashion that
are represented in dynamic media out in the world.
As a digital genre, fashion lm is linked to actual
physical contemporary events, to current and his-
torical practices in the industry. Textually, fashion
lm at times mediates these contexts reexively
and ironically and thereby points to its genre in-
novation as a culturally constituted formation and
expression. Here we follow Miller’s notion of genre
as social action (Miller, 1984). In this view, as will
be elaborated below, genres are socially and cultur-
ally located in situations of emergence, action and
use. As with web-based publications more gener-
ally, fashion lms are polymorphously constructed
and consumed: they are composed through a mix
of media, they function as distributed communi-
cation, and draw together a variety of design and
communicative practices.
We extend this view of genre as social action to
socio-cultural articulation with emphasis on genre
emergence and innovation in published digitally
mediated expressive and persuasive communica-
tion. The main question we address then is: how
may fashion lm inform our understanding of con-
temporary notions of digitally mediated genres as
emerging across media, in contexts of plural media
platforms and aesthetic references?
Below we propose that the notion of genre ecol-
ogy, already present in approaches to genre analy-
sis (Spinuzzi, 2003), be extended from document
and functional domains to one of cultural compo-
sition and expression in the creative industries.
This extension shifts focus from historical, linear
and even determinist views on genre innovation
as well as ones that examine it as a matter of de-
velopmental emergence. A genre ecology view, we
suggest, allows us to contextualise and investigate
innovation in genre as part of a nexus of factors and
features that arise through co-creation between de-
sign and media, context and use, form and function
and modes of cultural expression and exchange.
This multimodal, trans-medial view of media inno-
vation allows media and communication studies to
look beyond earlier views on genre as comprised of
typical constituents in demarcated domains, such
as lm, or as arising purely through textual gen-
eration in contexts of situated socio-cultural pro-
duction. We examine fashion lm as an emerging
genre explicitly embedded in, and as incorporating
a range of textual articulations in the mediationally
relevant contexts of fashion lm. The genre of fash-
ion lm refers to the aesthetic politics of fashion
(Gaugele 2014) and it explicitly comments upon
mediated assemblies of fashion and digital media
which transgress genres, platforms and contexts.
Directions
In the middle section we perform close critical
textual analyses of selected fashion lms that we
have chosen on the basis of both their prominence
online and in the fashion industry but also as em-
bodiment of cross-platform genre formations with
specic and strategic circulation of cultural refer-
ences and connotations. Contextually, and with ref-
erence to our own practice-based knowledge, these
selections have been made on the basis of exten-
sive viewing of fashion websites, communication
design production and research especially on web
and mobile media over two decades and research
into digital media, digital portfolios and online
branding and advertising. Our views are developed
ethnographically from experience as consumers of
cultural texts, as media critics and digital media
makers as well as researchers investigating rela-
tions between technology, media and culture in a
variety of contexts.
Skjulstad and Morrison, Fashion Film and Genre Ecology
The Journal of Media Innovations 3.2 (2016) 34
In this article we focus on the fashion lm as a
digital genre that has emerged since the turn of the
20th century. Fashion lm has been deconstructed
within fashion studies, principally in the ‘founda-
tional’ work of Marketa Uhlirova (2013a; 2013b)
that does address it in terms of genre. In contrast,
the object of our analysis is the complex, cross
mediational innovative nature of fashion lm as a
distributed genre. Our focus is not on lm but on
how, at the level of cultural expression, this slip-
pery genre – industry named and developed – is re-
alised and may be understood through situating it
as self-reexive web and mobile media located cul-
tural expression. Here we extend Uhlirova’s mark-
ing of fashion lm as an internet “genre” (Uhlirova,
2013b: Kindle) to an ecological view of genre in
order to more fully grasp how fashion lms may
be designed for multiple contexts of reference and
circulation, that is, for galleries and lm festivals as
well as for mobile and web display as part of popu-
lar culture.
Media and genre innovation occurs within the
contexts of cultural media production. This may
be understood from a culture industries perspec-
tive (e.g. Hartley, 2005). Such a perspective allows
us to unpack genre with respect to a mesh of prac-
tices, products and processes of co-creation in con-
texts of political and cultural economy (e.g., Lash
& Lurry 2007; Couldry 2013). Digitisation has had
profound consequences for how fashion is branded
and advertised, as well as for how the mediation of
fashion is articulated in and as ecology, that is in
a range of culturally and commercially interlinked
settings and contexts. These changes including the
following:
─ transformation of fashion brands into me-
dia and communication entities where cross
media concerns are a clear part of fashion hous-
es emerging role as patrons of art and media
─ the prevalence of media in many profes-
sional work practices and design based articu-
lations of fashion in the creative industries,
drawing on legacies but realised through media
innovation
─ complex interconnections between dier-
ent media platforms, technologies and users
compared with earlier formations and inuence
development, processes and articulation
─ the emergence of new media and design
networks whose actors co-produce new content,
expressions and forms in the media and cultural
sectors.
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Media, design and innovation
Media and innovation have been closely entwined
in plays between praxis and analysis. Paintings on
cave walls both symbolised the lifestyles and activi-
ties of hunter-gatherer societies while externalis-
ing material cultural representations; Vertov and
Eisenstein built conceptual and analytical readings
of lm through practices of making and these were
spooled back into lmic narratives, for example.
Relations between media and innovation occur and
are enacted between and across a number of planes
as outlined earlier in this journal by Josef Trappel
(2015). He proposes rening a media innovations
research agenda via Communication Innovation
Studies (CIS) and levels of value chains in the pro-
cesses of developing self-awareness on the part of
businesses. Levels included are a) structural con-
ditions, b) content production, c) communication
and media economics, d) distribution and delivery
and e) usage/user experience (Trappel, 2015: 15).
These levels inform our view on media innovation
in terms of genre and genre innovation, and are
brought together also in the study of actual textual
articulations via the concept of ecology.
Skjulstad and Morrison, Fashion Film and Genre Ecology
The Journal of Media Innovations 3.2 (2016) 35
and more recently game studies and cross platform
digital media. Much of this has been textual analy-
sis to locate, identify and categorise the constitu-
ent features of genres; work in applied discourse
and writing studies has centred on genre as textual
production in a sociocultural and developmental
learning view (Prior, 2009).
Few of these studies, however, frame genre in
terms of innovation that is linked to cultural pro-
duction practices. Much innovation theory in me-
dia studies has been about diusion and less about
how genre is composed, constructed, communi-
cated and conveyed in terms of modes of cultural
production and increasingly co-creation and dis-
tributed communication. Miller (1984) has framed
genre in a model of social action. At the core of
her approach is attention to the action used to ac-
complish the social purpose of a genre, not mere-
ly the prior focus on substance and form (Miller,
1984:151). Genre may thus be understood in terms
of social action; meaning is derived from the situ-
ation and the social context out of which the situ-
ation emerged and arose (Miller, 1984: 163). It is
the rhetorical means genre provides in cultural life
that is of interest: “A genre is a rhetorical means for
mediating private intensions and social exigence; it
We argue that these characteristics may be un-
derstood as emergent, interrelated, dynamic and
transmedial and central to understanding genre
in terms of ecology. They are part of the changing
textual and contextual dynamics of production and
consumption of fashion and of changing cultural
articulations of genre.
Genre and (digital) cultural production
To situate our own genre ecology view on fashion
lm as genre it is necessary to back track slightly to
summarise key approaches to genre and how genre
has been framed in studies of cultural production,
consumption and critique. Debates have taken
place about the denition and scope of genre and
genre innovation. These have in part been within
disciplines such as lm or linguistics. Types, prop-
erties and features of genres have resulted in con-
ceptual and typological frameworks that have not
always been in close dialogue as to their textual and
intertextual referents. Genre has been discussed
widely in disciplinary domains, such as literary,
media and lm studies (e.g., Bakhtin, 1981; Bor-
dwell, 1989), linguistics, discourse analysis, theo-
retic and writing studies (Freedman & Medway,
1994; Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995; Swales, 2004)
motivates by connecting the private with the public,
the singular with the recurrent.” (1984:163). In this
approach Miller (1984) argues we focus on actions
used to realise genre and not the typical attention
to substance and form. Taking on board Miller’s fo-
cus on genre as generative, and viewing meaning as
dependent on the situations and contexts in which
a genre arises (see also Miller, 2015), our focus is
not on genre as structure in context, but how genre
may be understood in terms of ecology.
Here our work aligns with that applied to online
communication and to blogs in particular (Miller
& Shepherd, 2004). In their rhetorical analysis of
blogs as social action, Carolyn Miller and Dawn
Shepherd provide an extensive view on the cultural
conditions for blogs as articulations of communica-
tive action and the various subject positions blogs
support and make possible. In particular, they
stress how blogs must be understood as funda-
mentally culturally situated for social action to take
place. According to Miller and Shepherd (2004:
2), for genres to evolve, they have to “… allow for
the incorporation of novelty, the accommodation
of changed constraints, the tweaking of ideology,
which eventually leads to the redenition of deco-
rum, and the imposition of a new ideology”. These
Skjulstad and Morrison, Fashion Film and Genre Ecology
The Journal of Media Innovations 3.2 (2016) 36
In earlier work we have concentrated on the ar-
ticulation, or textual strategies in a wider commu-
nicative ecology of digital advertising. We looked
at a web-based auto industry campaign concerning
the promotion of a luxury hybrid SUV (Morrison &
Skjulstad, 2010) and at the promotional strategies
of a then leading mobile phone producer through
a viral and participatory form of media advertising
that invites users to upload their own adverts and
evidence of their literacies (Morrison & Skjulstad,
2011). Arvidsson (2006) argues that brands have
become an important factor in people’s lives. In his
view, through tapping into specic value systems,
brands have the ability to inscribe these into every-
day consumer practices, thereby linking decisions
in life and life style to consumerism and transform-
ing everyday life into economic value.
The importance of genre as social action (Miller,
1984; Miller & Shepherd, 2004) is that it allows ex-
pressions of genre at the level of mediated articula-
tion to be understood as socially and culturally sit-
uated and as growing out of and evolving through
practice. This enables us to see genres as sites where
media innovation fosters continual change, and as
instances of social action in terms of ideology. In
catering to a range of dierent audiences across
digital formats and platforms and across cultural
domains, fashion is mediated polyvocally and in
ways that connect everyday social media practices
with sophisticated fashion mediation, inscribing as
discussed by Adam Arvidsson (2006), fashion and
culture coupled with consumer culture into every
day life. Fashion lm seen in terms of genre ecology
moves the negotiation of overlaps and ideological
distinctions between art and advertising into a dig-
itally networked and distributed cultural environ-
ment, rendering traditional distinctions between
roles, genres and rhetorical positions into a state
of ux.
Commissioning lms from artist lm makers,
entering lm festival screenings and designing for
careful referencing of works, and discrete display
of aliations to artists and specialist professionals
relevant to the fashion brand, is part of an ongoing
negotiation between art and fashion. The relation
of fashion to art and commerce tends to be viewed
from polarised positions, and as stated by Mitchell
Okley Smith and Alison Kubler (2013:14), “Fashion
is popularly understood to be ckle, transient and
largely driven by popular culture, whereas ne art
is viewed as timeless, considered and elitist”. These
binary positions are present in fashion lm. To
views on genre, novelty, and ideology, when paired
with a notion of ecology, allow us to position fash-
ion lm in the centre of a wider discussion of media
innovation at the level of genre ecology as well as
ideologically related to art, commerce and cultural
production and consumer culture.
In terms of innovation, more ad hoc, emergent
and process-oriented approaches to genre have
been developed on the basis of empirical studies
(e.g., Van De Ven et al., 1999) that allow for di-
vergent and convergent patterns of more fractally
framed development of genre. Properties and char-
acteristics of digitalisation, such as repurposing and
mixing of style, content and form, have contributed
to increased application and recognition of known
genre formats and related the expectations on the
part of audiences and ultimately user-consumers.
Media domains have seen considerable transfor-
mation due to the uptake of digital tools and modes
of distribution. One case in point is that of the news
industry where processes of news-gathering and
genres of news mediation have undergone consid-
erable change. As Freadman (2015) reminds us,
though, genres provide openings for articulation
and it is this level of realisation that we see operat-
ing through the notion of genre ecology.
Skjulstad and Morrison, Fashion Film and Genre Ecology
The Journal of Media Innovations 3.2 (2016) 37
social action in the interconnectedness of an ecoso-
cial system that encompasses given norms that are
structured and stable and part of socially shaped
schemas for engagement, while also being in emer-
gence as discourses in the making (Morrison 2010;
see also Miller, this issue).
The notion of ecology here needs some disam-
biguation as it is used in environmental and natu-
ral sciences and anthropology as a mode of cultural
ecology (e.g., Kottak, 1999) and media studies.
Cultural ecology sees the natural and physical en-
vironment as having a non-determinist inuence
on our cultural and socio-material ones. We adapt
to the systems and forces of the “biosphere” yet we
also develop cultural references and relations to
it through expression and articulation of cultural
activity and production, such as in the work of
Gregory Bateson (1973) and systems theory more
generally. Important to note is that this approach
has been critiqued for an element of environmental
determinism. Drawing in part on this tradition and
its connections within social and cultural anthro-
pology, and once rmly a part of structuralist views
on media in the 1970s in the work of Walter Ong,
Neil Postman and Marshall McLuhan, the notion
of media ecology has now shifted to include atten-
more fully understand the genre, a notion of ecolo-
gy - encompassing cultural references and legacies
of established genres of both elitist and popular
culture - presents a wider frame through which we
might view fashion lm.
Towards genre ecology
Genre may be understood as part of what David
Gauntlett (2015) refers to as a creative turn in me-
dia research. This turn encompasses a dynamic of
textual and contextual production. It extends be-
yond earlier conceptualisations of media conver-
gence (e.g., Jenkins, 2006; Deuze, 2007) to what
we see as a developmental and exploratory textual
expression of genre innovation that is part of a wid-
er communicative and indeed genre ecology. Jay
Lemke (1998: 286) suggests that:
Instead of theorising causal relations from one au-
tonomous domain to another … if we unite all these
domains as participants in the myriad subnetworks
of an ecosocial system, we can give detailed accounts
of their interdependencies and the self-organising
dynamics of this complex system.
This is in tune with Miller’s stance on genre as
tion to context and interdisciplinarity (Strate 2010)
and appears in domains as platform studies (e.g.,
Fuller, 2005).
The term genre ecology has also appeared within
the literature on genre, though not in that on media
ecology and media innovation. Genre ecology has
tended to be developed and applied with reference
to technical communication and the role of genre in
organisations (e.g., Spinizzi, 2003). Clay Spinuzzi
and Mark Zachry (2000: 202) propose that genre
ecology is a framework suited to the study of “com-
pound mediation”. Drawing on activity theory, by
this they mean the mesh of artifacts, from software
code to post it notes, that are involved in people
making mediated meaning in collaborative, coor-
dinated and process based work activities. They
highlight three aspects of genre ecologies. They are
1) governed by contingency and come into being
through processes of negotiation and change, 2)
typically decentralised in being distributed in their
combinatorial composition between design, inten-
tion and usability, and 3) relatively stable in ways
users make connections between the genres they
use, despite contingency.
Spinuzzi (2002) conceptualised genre ecology
as an heuristic, analytical framework to account
Skjulstad and Morrison, Fashion Film and Genre Ecology
The Journal of Media Innovations 3.2 (2016) 38
As we show below, genre may be seen as part
of a complex and intertangled weave of mediated
fabric, as articulation from within the culture in-
dustries that references its own ‘patterns’ and pub-
lic performative enactments. These enactments are
embodied, screened and situated through design
and as design. In order to clarify this we now move
to unpack relations between digital media, brands
and fashion.
Fashion lm: legacies and projections
The history of fashion as moving image is rich and
it encompasses a range of genres and contexts as
fashion has historically been a vital ingredient in
cinema (Uhlirova, 2013a; Uhlirova, 2013b; Gaines,
2000) and intrinsic to the Hollywood star-system
and contemporary celebrity and media culture
(Church Gibson, 2012). Within lm and fashion
studies, fashion in lm has been scrutinised ex-
tensively (Warner, 2012). However, outside of
traditional cinematic genres such as Hollywood
costume dramas and documentary genres, explo-
rations of fashion and the moving image in digital
and networked domains have been given less at-
tention outside of fashion studies, as has fashion
mediation as site for media and genre innovation.
for the matrix of artifacts, communication types
and practices that are employed in technical com-
munication to mediate the activities of work. This
is work that is characterised by stability but also
contingency and interpretation, more conceptually
than functionally. “Unlike other frameworks deal-
ing with compound mediation …, the genre ecology
framework is centrally concerned with how people
interpret genres, how they contingently intermedi-
ate genres, and how these contingencies become
relatively stable over time …”. (Spinuzzi, 2002:
200). He sees genre as tools in use and not artifacts
in isolation (Spinuzzi, 2002: 201) and that inter-
ecology elements may also be examined further,
such as in the uses of genres in technical communi-
cation and collaborative work in teams.
Thomas Eriksson (2000) included genre ecol-
ogy in research into “babble” in computer mediated
communication (CMC). This Eriksson interpreted
in conversational terms as “global pull”, “topical
pull” and “conversational impetus” as means to
unpacking how participants are recruited into dif-
ferent genres. We oer three core more culturally
located discursive categories (Commissioning, Dis-
arming and Popularising) through which fashion
lm may be seen as a mediated genre innovation.
However, fashion designers and mediators
have a rich record of early adoption and adapta-
tion of digital media technologies. For example,
Helmut Lang’s Fall/Winter 1998/1999 collection
was the rst to be only live-streamed for an online
audience, causing scandal among those deprived
of their usual front-row seats (Muriale 2014). In
terms of moving images on the web, discussing the
evolution of fashion lm without stressing the im-
portance of the web based platform Showstudio.
com, established in 2000, and which has been piv-
otal in developing the forms and formats of fashion
lm in close collaboration with a range of design-
ers, artists and photographers is dicult (Muriale,
2014; Uhlirova, 2013a).
Fashion and media are entwined in a variety
of ways, and the range of linkages between fash-
ion, art and media are so diverse and are beyond
the reach of this article. Uhlirova (2013a; 2013b)
traces her historical account of the development
of fashion lm back to early cinema of attractions
(Gunning, 1990) and to the tinted lms of the Pathé
brothers and to lms by George Méliès at the be-
ginning of the 19th century. She discusses fashion as
proposed by Gunning, as exhibitionistic cinematic
practices celebrating the possibility of being able to
Skjulstad and Morrison, Fashion Film and Genre Ecology
The Journal of Media Innovations 3.2 (2016) 39
However in fashion studies, Khan (2012a; 2012b)
and Sabina Muriale (2014) have inquired into fash-
ion lm and looked to the study of digital media,
for example as found in the writings of Lev Manov-
ich (2001). These authors have focused on ways in
which fashion lm as an emerging genre is embed-
ded in digital media culture and has paved the way
for further linkages between media and fashion
studies. This is a cultural setting which is crucial in
changing how fashion is conceptualised, produced
and mediated.
Extending this view, Khan (2012) has inquired
into the non-narrative qualities of the lms of Hog-
ben for the fashion designer Gareth Pugh. Kahn
links these non-narrative qualities, such as its
disconnection to the real through disruption and
repetition of movement, to simulation of the real-
ity of the garment itself, to Benjamin’s writings on
the object of art in the era of mechanical reproduc-
tion. According to Khan (2012: 259), “The moving
sequence is not just the index of the real but also
ontological image convention, itself far more con-
cerned with the nature of the image than with its
content”. She links the lm to Manovich’s concept
of permanent presence (2001), as the restrictions
of time and space are of little relevance in digital
media. As stated by Khan (2012: 248), “The digital
show something via the moving image (Uhlirova,
2013b; Gunning, 1990).
There now exist a range of Fashion lm festivals,
devoted only to the screening of the whole spec-
trum of moving fashion imagery. These festivals in-
clude the Berlin Fashion Film Festival (BFFF)1 and
A Shaded View on Fashion Film (ASVOFF),2 which
since its launch in 2008, as stated on its website,
“has gained critical acclaim for encouraging both
emerging and established artists to reconsider the
way that fashion is presented and for challenging
the conventional parameters of lm.” According to
Nathalie Khan (2012), the mediation of fashion as
moving image has not only been pivotal in chang-
ing how fashion is perceived and understood, it has
also changed how fashion is produced and embed-
ded in and as culture.
However, the emerging genre of fashion lm
has received less scholarly attention and has large-
ly been overlooked by lm scholars, with a few no-
table exceptions such as Uhlirova (2013a, 2013b).
1 See http://www.berlinfashionlmfestival.net/about (Accessed
14.10.2015).
2 See http://ashadedviewonfashionlm.com (Accessed
14.10.2015).
image has no natural end, but instead oers per-
manent presence. It is this link between the moving
image, consciousness, and the “here and now” that
suits our notion of fashion”.
These views on fashion lm point to it as being
very much a matter of hybrid media construction
and communication. A variety of multi-skilled art-
ists are now drawn into fashion lm in the ways that
oer mediations of fashion to new audiences out-
side of the white cube or lm clubs. Importantly, as
a genre fashion lm works are often commissioned.
Internationally proled lm directors, such as Ro-
man Polanski, Agnes Varda and David Lynch, have
been commissioned to direct short lms for fash-
ion brands such as Prada, Dior and Miu Miu. Seen
together, these works articulate the transference of
aesthetic value and nancial means between lm
and fashion, as well as the tensions between artistic
autonomy and more traditional restraints of adver-
tising.
Fashion lm is one of the means through which
fashion is circulated within a wider and indeed
global fashion culture and commercial economy.
However, it needs to be understood as more than
simply mediation and exchange. Helen Warner
(2012: 122) considers the development and preva-
lence of new media as important forces in a trans-
Skjulstad and Morrison, Fashion Film and Genre Ecology
The Journal of Media Innovations 3.2 (2016) 40
as articulations of how a genre may evolve through
media innovation that takes place across discursive
domains and as instances of transversal genre in-
novation across and beyond conventions, formats
and platforms. We address this via three chosen
and interlinked concepts arrived at from bottom
up reviewing of fashion lms, earlier research in
branding, multimodality and genre analysis. These
are: a) Commissioning , b) Disarming, and c) Pop-
ularising.
By commissioning we mean how cultural pro-
duction is enabled through the nancial support
from a brand who acts as a patron of art, and as we
argue, as patron of media design, and at times also
of media and genre innovation. In the context of
fashion lm this refers to the generation of cross-
platform content that is entwined within a media
ecology, textually and contextually through a num-
ber of discursive meditational moves.
Disarming refers to how multiple and conict-
ing mediations of a brand’s image are layered on
top of each other so as to convey facets to a brand’s
identity. Humour, self reexivity and irony is add-
ed to sleek and conventional mediations of a fash-
ion brand. Concerning fashion lm, we examine
how the genre is realised mediationally through
humour and irony as part of a wider ecology.
Popularising centres on tapping into formats
already established and migrated from tv to the
internet and to mobile platforms, and to how fash-
ion enters digital popular culture fully through art-
ist collaborations with musicians, extending and
transforming genres such as the music video so as
to also explicitly include the mediation of fashion
for specic brands. Our focus in presenting fashion
lm as genre is to show how the catwalk is extended
and transformed via popular celebrity culture.
These concepts oer a transmedial and multi-
modal view on how the genre of fashion lm might
be understood as positioned in the cross-sections
of the mediations of outcomes of interdisciplinary
aesthetic practice, the context of creative media
ecologies and the aspects of innovation central
to both media development and the evolution of
fashion. The selected lms show how fashion lm
as a genre sits between these interconnected areas
of study. The focus on cross-platform commission-
ing allows us to see how fashion lm as a genre
may be understood as situated in the creative
culture ecologies as cultural, meditational acts of
communicative construction. However, it may also
direct attention to how such media commissioning
practices render critical positions to contemporary
branding dicult.
formation of the ways in which fashion is produced
and consumed, but also how such a development
has “… forced traditional platforms of print and
screen media to adopt innovative strategies in or-
der to reach consumers”.
How these lms are mediated alongside with a
video of the latest fashion catwalk show and digi-
tal reproductions of the print advertisements of the
season will be discussed later in the article with re-
spect to the notion of genre and media ecologies.
However, we need to heed the observations of one
of the leading theorists on fashion lm, Uhlirova,
who argues that the genre of fashion lm is a messy
one, one of diversity, and must be understood “As
a heterogeneous cultural form with no clearly pre-
dened stylistic criteria or conventions, the fashion
lm eludes any attempt at a neat classication as a
genre” (Uhlirova, 2013b: 120).
9:59</(,/:7/(/8;?;,9/5(9:(!35B9;:(!9?@
Three connected concepts
In the selected lms below, we show how fashion
lms are embedded in a distributed media cul-
tural landscape. Here, the lms add extra layers of
meaning to a fashion brand, but may also be viewed
Skjulstad and Morrison, Fashion Film and Genre Ecology
The Journal of Media Innovations 3.2 (2016) 41
Commissioning: the generation of cross-platform
content
Miu Miu, a brand owned by the Prada Group,
commissioned a series of lms directed by a group
of leading female lmmakers. According to Miu
Miu’s website, the lms explore aspects of contem-
porary women-hood. At the time of writing, ten
short lms are presented chronologically on the
Miu Miu website. Among the lmmakers we nd
the director Agnes Varda, known for her historical
role in new wave cinema and in experimental docu-
mentary.
One of the lms, No 8, Somebody (2014), di-
rected by Miranda July, presents a series of inter-
linked, personal, yet mediated, encounters enabled
by the fully functional mobile application Some-
body (2014), freely downloadable from Appstore
(Figures 1 & 2). The “app” provides the possibility
of engaging other users, enabling them to take part
in face-to-face encounters with strangers when de-
livering a message as a proxy for the sender. The
series of scenes in the lm all includes the app in
what includes a relationship break-up, a reconcili-
ation between friends, a marriage proposal, as well
as an exchange between a demanding texting plant
and two prison ocials. The lm is structured as a
series of encounters made possible by the app, giv-
ing special attention to the personal and authentic
as mediated through a digital application.
The app was launched at the Venice Film Fes-
tival along with the lm (Figure 3).3 The fact that
July’s creative practices are fundamentally inter-
disciplinary, as she is an actor, lmmaker, artist,
and journalist - and that an app developed along-
side a fashion lm is “screened” as part of a lm for
a fashion label tells us how fashion lm as a genre is
deeply interconnected also on an institutional level
with the lm industry, the fashion industry as well
as with industries within digital design for phones.
3 See http://www.mirandajuly.com (Accessed 18.10.2015).
Figures 1 and 2. Screen grabs from Somebody, directed
by Miranda July and mediated at Miu Miu’s website as
part of the commissioned series of lms, Women’s Tales.
Figure 3. Screen grab of the app Somebody, featuring in
the lm Somebody by Miranda July, commissioned by
Miu Miu.
Skjulstad and Morrison, Fashion Film and Genre Ecology
The Journal of Media Innovations 3.2 (2016) 42
providing her with cues for her development of the
characters in the lm. Her selection of characters,
environments and situations in which the actors
wore pieces from the Miu Miu collection linked to
every day settings, is breaking with the notion of
high fashion as something out of place in the mun-
dane everyday world. The garments and accesso-
ries featured in the lm are shown in contexts other
than what might be expected in a fashion lm.
Many of the garments are presented in most un-
glamorous everyday contexts. For example, an el-
derly woman interrupts two young women who are
quarrelling. They turn their Miu Miu-clad backs to
each other. The elderly woman walks o and we
are drawn to the fact that she is wearing a knitted
jumper and carrying a bag from the same collec-
tion. Most of the costumes in eect are displays of
the collection. Instead of aestheticizing the collec-
tion further as might be anticipated, the garments
blend into a very “real” everydayness conveyed in
the lm. This realism is also partly achieved in that
the app Somebody is fully functional and has been
designed in tandem with the lm production for
use in the real world. This knowing repositioning
of a collection that presents luxury appeal serves
to add a more human side to the brand allowing it
to be presented simultaneously as both glamorous
and unglamorous in use. The glamorous version of
the collection conveyed through moving images is
available to the viewers of the website in a lmic
presentation of the season’s catwalk show.
Central to the Prada group’s branding practices
is the international Rotterdam-based partnership
OMA - centring on urbanism, architecture and cul-
ture along with its related company AMO, a design
and research studio working in a range of domains
such as fashion, publishing, and cultural analysis.
The aim of Rem Koolhaas (the architect, theo-
rist and lm-maker and the most publicly known
among the partners) has been to re-conceptualise
shopping into a cultural activity (Chung et al.,
2001; Koolhaas et al., 2001). This has been pivotal
in steering commerce into being recognised and
appreciated as a cultural endeavour. AMO’s long-
standing collaboration with the Prada is but one ex-
ample of high fashion brands that engage in what
often is being referred to as “high culture”. Such
collaborations are themselves part of communicat-
ing the brand’s identity, and extend also to include
large architectural projects (Klingmann, 2007;
Ryan, 2007; Skjulstad, 2014).
How and why fashion houses such as Prada
now act as patrons of the arts and architecture is
analysed in depth by Nicky Ryan (2007). She inter-
In the website of Miranda July, the app develop-
ment is described under the category ‘art’, and in
the text describing the app, hotspots with a criti-
cal mass of users of the app listed are primarily art
museums. Also, given July’s previous treatment of
the topic of fashion, a range of other art projects,
such as The Miranda, an art project shaped as a
shoulder bag, are presented in the context of an art
fashion store online.4 In acting as a patron of the
arts, Miu Miu sets a whole web of references to ar-
tistic practices relating to the interconnectedness
of art, fashion and media in motion in collaborating
with July, thus extending the Prada group’s role of
patron of ne art as discussed by Ryan (2007) into
the wider context of media and popular culture at
the same time as including cinema.
In a video interview about the process of devel-
oping the lm included in Miu Miu’s website, July
points to how the Somebody app was developed in
parallel to the making of the lm. She expresses sur-
prise that Miu Miu covered the costs of developing
the app. In this video interview she also discusses
the role of costume in her lmmaking. According
to July, the collection aided her as a lmmaker in
4 See http://welcomecompanions.com/collections/classics/products/
the-miranda-limited-edition (Accessed 18.10.2015).
Skjulstad and Morrison, Fashion Film and Genre Ecology
The Journal of Media Innovations 3.2 (2016) 43
prets Prada as a modern and enlightened patron of
“avant-garde” art and architecture, focusing in par-
ticular on the ongoing collaboration between Prada
and OMA/AMO. In focusing on the production of
symbolic capital, Ryan (2007: 7) observes that “…
what is at stake is the corporate appropriation of
‘avant-garde’ positions within the parameters of
the market.” Drawing on Ryan’s views, such sym-
bolic capital is also generated in a range of closely
related elds that all share the allure of what were
once bastions of rened “high” culture, such as art,
architecture and museums. The role of a liberal pa-
tron makes it dicult to adopt a critical position on
the brand.
However, fashion’s relations with and dissemi-
nation through media may also be seen in tandem
with the industry’s manifold relations with the art
world. The expansive role of Prada as patron of the
arts is also seen in the Prada Groups’ branding of
its other label Miu Miu. The Fondazione Prada fo-
cuses on ne art (Ryan, 2007); Prada and Miu Miu
commission lms, such as the short lm A Thera-
phy (2012), directed by Roman Polanski and star-
ring Helena Bonham Carter and Ben Kingsley. In
commissioning a series of lms for these interna-
tionally established brands, as well as the app for
Miu Miu, the brand builds corporate reach into cin-
ematic and digital development.
This is not just a very recent development in
terms of lm commissions. As early as 2005, Prada
collaborated with Ridley Scott and his daughter
Jordan Scott in directing the short lm Thunder
Perfect Mind that was released to coincide with
the launch of Prada’s fragrance, and screened for
the rst time at the Berlin International Film Fes-
tival.5 Instead of art patronage, media patronage is
brought to the fore in the form of curated media
and lmic content. In extending Ryan’s critique of
Prada as a patron of arts (Ryan, 2007), we include
how commissions and curatorial practices relating
to fashion lm and digital innovation in the context
of art consolidates the brand’s position as enlight-
ened and liberal cultural institution. A brand that is
positioning and presenting itself as a connoisseur
and as an enabler of cultural production, however,
may eectively disarm critical voices, as Ryan sug-
gests, especially when the commissioned works en-
ter the lm festival and art museum circuit.
Disarming: fashion mediated via humour and irony
Fashion is unquestionably known for the recycling
5 See http://www.prada.com/en/a-future-archive/short-mov-
ies/movies/thunder-perfect-mind.html (Accessed 14.10.2015).
of earlier styles and the generation of new ones and
recombinations of the two, and as fundamentally
communicative (Barnard 2001). Fashion is being
constructed and explored online with humour in
self-reective twists on the stereotypes and clichés
available to already media savvy audiences bored
with the aestheticized imagery that saturate beauty
and fashion advertisements. However, in parody-
ing such clichés - as seen in Matthew Frost short
lm for spoof label Viva Vena, a ctive ospring
of the brand Viva Cava Fashion Film (2013), ste-
reotyped conceptions of the genre appear (Figures
4 & 5). This reects a genre that is crowded with
beautiful, but poorly narrated lms, characterised
by quasi poetic-slowness and lack of narrative mo-
tivation. As a genre in formation, one with few es-
tablished conventions, the lmmakers are situated
in a range of dierent contexts, such as for example
fashion photography or styling. Developed in cre-
ative contexts where the quality of fashion styling,
hair, make up, and mis-en scene - more than per-
haps narration - is central to mediating fashion,
the lms still tend to be critiqued from inside the
industry. However, while also rejecting strict rules
and conventions, the genre of fashion lm remains
open for explorations of moving fashion imagery by
amateurs and creative professionals alike.
Skjulstad and Morrison, Fashion Film and Genre Ecology
The Journal of Media Innovations 3.2 (2016) 44
Self-absorption and self-promotion is the theme
of this ironic lm. A young woman played by Lizzie
Caplan whispers sensually about her interesting,
trendy preoccupations: she likes records from the
sixties, she edits a blog, she is interested in art (per-
formance and collage), and so on. She even thinks
in French. This lm is shot in a soft light and with
ambient music that helps create a dreamy self ori-
ented perspective as Caplan rambles on. Suddenly
her friends appear, and as they pull her out of her
inner world she says, “I’m in an art fashion lm”,
to which they reply, “No, it’s a commercial”. These
onlookers and we the online viewers are joined in
placing this rst-person lmic representation in its
place within a wider industry and as a piece of self-
mirroring that is seemingly unaware of its commer-
cial genre identity. Uhlirova (2013b) says that fash-
ion lm is often queried as to whether it is art or
advertising; this binarism is not productive analyti-
cally in understanding the genre. The lm does not
merely reference other fashion lms. Rather, it is
articulated as a playful and critical meta-comment
on how the genre juggles with the recurring debate
about such lms as being advertising or art. Rather,
fashion lm oscillates between these spheres. The
tensions and ambiguities in the relations between
these at times opposing positions may be under-
Figures 4 and 5. The genre of fashion lm is also hilariously parodied as a meta-comment on the genre, as seen in this lm
labelled Fashion Film, directed by Matthew Frost for Vena Cava under the spoof name Viva Vena 2013.
Figures 6 and 7. Screen grabs from the short online advertising lm Spring/Summer 2013 for the fashion house Lanvin,
featuring its creative director Alber Elbaz, who appears as a comic gure and as parodying conceptions of the ‘star’ fashion
designer.
Skjulstad and Morrison, Fashion Film and Genre Ecology
The Journal of Media Innovations 3.2 (2016) 45
stood as inherent in the genre, and as central in
our ecology framing of fashion lm. The relation-
ship between fashion and art has been productively
scrutinised by among others Vicki Karaminas and
Adam Geczy (2012), who acknowledge the close
collaborations between artists and fashion design-
ers across a wide range of contexts of cultural pro-
duction. To view fashion lm as either art or adver-
tising may lead us to overlook important aspects of
contemporary fashion mediation and promotional
and persuasive communication as opposed to see-
ing such relations as vital to the genre and its wider
ecology.
Humour and self-reectivity is central to many
fashion lms, as for example seen in short lm by
Lanvin for the spring/summer collection 2013.
The digitally mediated character of the lm itself is
central to the narration, presented as a Skype con-
versation between Lanvin’s creative director at the
time, Alber Elbaz and the organisers of the fashion
shoot for the season’s ad campaign. The imagery
and the dialogue in the lm are completely out of
sync, making it obvious that the creative director
(who plays himself) is ironically not really paying
any attention to what he sees at the shoot with Ste-
ven Meisel, and parodies the stereotyped image of
the creative director of a major fashion house. The
video is featured on YouTube, and has been spread
and commented upon. Online fashion-newspaper
thebusinessoashion.com, commented on the lm,
as Internet Culture interfering with the airtight
perfection of print fashion media.
The lm adds a meta-layer of meaning not pres-
ent in the print advertising campaign, and while
the print advert may be read separately as a con-
ventional high fashion advertisement, the lm con-
veys Lanvin as playful. The lm may stand alone,
as can the print advert. However, if the lm and
the print advert are regarded as a composited con-
struct, a more nuanced image of the brand appears.
The lm might be read as modifying and provid-
ing facets to the articulations of the brand’s identity
while not stepping beyond the more conservative
expectations of beauty and form present in the es-
tablished print fashion media genres outside of the
avant-garde print publications.
However, the self-reexivity conveyed through
the lm is absent in the print advertising cam-
paign. The lm addresses an Internet-culture-
fashion savvy audience. It also addresses an audi-
ence that reads fashion across media types and
platforms. The lm ironically annexes a high cul-
ture view of fashion that is democratised by web
2.0 technologies, blogs and social media platforms
(Khamis & Munt, 2010). Such an audience is fa-
miliar with fashion and media and has sophisticat-
ed fashion media preferences. These are readers
who take pleasure in a more challenging aesthetic
mediation of fashion, and who read fashion as dis-
tributed across screens and texts.
As seen in the case of Lanvin, a lm might also
draw attention to and add an extra layer of mean-
ing not available to the often more conservative
campaign photographs in print magazines. This
may then also add to the experience of a more nu-
anced and multi-facetted view of fashion media.
In placing the Skype interface on top of the lm,
as spectators we view the lm as meta-comment
on the photographic setting, the art direction and
styling. We look “through” the façade of the brand
as displayed in polished fashion imagery to focus
instead on how the brand is presented as a more
humorous one than typically mediated through
static images. The lm provides a tongue-in-cheek
meta-comment to the public appearance of the
brand in print. Through this mediated and disarm-
ing marketing ploy layers of meaning are added to
an interrelation of genres. As a result, two parallel
yet separately designed genre mediations are inter-
loped, demonstrating how fashion lm as a genre
might be more fully conceptualised as mediated
Skjulstad and Morrison, Fashion Film and Genre Ecology
The Journal of Media Innovations 3.2 (2016) 46
across singular textual expressions and established
genres. This, however is only possible to under-
stand if these mediations of Lanvin are coupled and
seen together as a composite entity.
Popularising: the catwalk extended via popular
celebrity culture
In her discussion of the “permanent presence” of
digital fashion mediation via digital moving im-
ages, Khan (2012b), stresses the importance of the
Internet’s capacity to mediate moving images of
fashion and how fashion now needs to be under-
stood within a digital frame. However, emerging
genres of digital moving images also need to be un-
derstood as providing new conditions for fashion
designers. As a result, they may be actively consid-
ered in the design process itself and at times as re-
mediating existing genres of live fashion mediation
such as the catwalk-show. Referring to a range of
online sites of fashion mediation, such as Show-
studio.com and Nowness.com, as curatorial spaces
for staging of fashion, Khan (2012: 252) sees these
spaces as challenging “… the immediate experience
of fashion as live event, as well as fashion as mate-
rial objects”.
In Khan’s discussion (2012b: 253) of the digital
fashion lm screened at Pitti Imagine, # 79 (2011),
the focus is placed on Ruth Hogben’s pioneer-
ing work with Showstudio.com and that of Gareth
Pugh and the lmic presentation of his collection
that was projected onto a Florentine church ceiling.
According to Khan, “Hogben’s lms no longer dif-
ferentiate between object and representation, nor
between image and physical presence, real time
and projection. Non-narrative fashion lm relies
on simulation, as the garment is no longer present
in time or space.” (op. cit.).
However, when the catwalk show is replaced
by the digital lm, as in the case of Pitti Immagine
#79, and the lm itself projects the designer’s vi-
sion of the collection, Kahn links such a mediation
to creative control of how the collection is to be pre-
sented. This is apparent in a more recent lm the
designer Tom Ford released in 2015 as a replace-
ment for a live catwalk show for his S/S 2016 col-
lection. Directed by Nick Knight, the lm presents
a mannequin disco nightclub party on an under-lit
catwalk featuring Lady Gaga. The event is set to the
tones of her remixed version of the 1979 hit I Want
Your Love by Chic. Tom Ford, who usually presents
his collections at fashion week in London and New
Figure 8. Screen grab for the online fashion lm show-
casing the Tom Ford S/S 2016 Collection by Tom Ford,
featuring Lady Gaga.
Figure 9. Screen grab from Tom Ford’s website, showing
the collection as a digital look book. The entire collection
was photographed at the lm set.
Skjulstad and Morrison, Fashion Film and Genre Ecology
The Journal of Media Innovations 3.2 (2016) 47
ors and conveyed his visual sensibility in the over-
all mis-en-scene of the lm (Church Gibson, 2012).
It came as perhaps no surprise that Ford applied
fashion lm as a vehicle in launching his S/S 2016
collection given his recent cinematic work.
The pop icon Lady Gaga features in Ford’s S/S
2016 fashion lm. Her connections to the fashion
industry and her direct reference to fashion and
art are manifold. She has collaborated with a range
of designers, such as Alexander McQueen. Lady
Gaga has been involved in a series of projects with
Nick Knight and others via showstudio.com. Writ-
ing about the importance of the close working and
artistic relations between the fashion industry and
celebrities, Endora Comer-Arldt (2014: 45) points
to how such relations provide an entrance to scru-
tinize the “… hybridity of fashion as an economic
business and cultural movement”. Returning to
Miller (1984), genres change, evolve and decay. As
with fashion lm as a genre, an ecology view opens
for seeing genres such as the televised music video
as having evolved into a hybrid form, articulated as
fashionable mediation of music, and as a celebri-
ty-clad fashion spectacle mediated alongside the
sound of contemporary popular culture. In an ecol-
ogy view on genre, these lms, we propose, need to
be seen as interwoven into the textual fabrics spun
around and across them, and as part of an extended
understanding of genre itself.
8;:8?=59;:
We have elaborated how genre innovation in fash-
ion lm can be understood as taking place in and
across the aesthetic, creative and commercial inter-
sections of a range of domains. We introduced the
notions of Commissioning, Disarming and Popula-
rising as a means to framing and unpacking rela-
tions in a media ecology view on fashion lm. These
relations and their intersections can be studied
and understood at a macro level as genre ecology
through an interdisciplinary coupling of insights
from writing and rhetoric, via innovation studies,
from the cultural industries as well as knowledge
stemming from studies of digital media innovation
and communication design and fashion studies.
However, also at a micro level, and using the
three core constituent categories, the selected lms
show how these overarching couplings of industry
and artistic and popular cultural practices may be
articulated in actual textual expressions. These are
York, released the lm after an unannounced ab-
sence from the previous catwalk season.
The video catwalk show has a double funtion:
while still presenting a fashion collection, it si-
multaneously can be seen as a music video, and
embodies a complete integration of the genres of
fashion lm and music video. In terms of circula-
tion, mixed techniques are used to gain attention
and the astute editorial presentation as the lm is
designed to reach audiences far beyond the closed
circles of live catwalk shows.
Writing on fashion and celebrity culture, Pa-
mela Church Gibson (2012: 1) points to the need
to see the changing landscape of fashion in close
relation to emerging changes in the entire topog-
raphy of visual culture, one characterised by a “…
new proliferation of celebrity culture as a global,
collective and disturbing obsession”. However,
Ford’s connections to cinema are already attached
to the brand, as he secured the rights to Christo-
pher Isherwood’s 1960 novel A Single Man, which
he modied and directed as a feature lm. In this
prize-winning and Oscar-nominated lm, Ford
added elements of fashion and style not present in
the original novel. He clad the protagonist in Ford
menswear, situated the characters in sleek interi-
Skjulstad and Morrison, Fashion Film and Genre Ecology
The Journal of Media Innovations 3.2 (2016) 48
mediated articulations of a genre that carries con-
gurations of the aesthetic, technical and cultural
in and across media platforms and contexts. The
examples demonstrate the mediational conditions
that make possible the genre innovations and link-
ages across domains. Further, fashion lm as genre
innovation in its own right functions as part of the
contemporary mediation of fashion. The examples
also demonstrate that the notion of ecology that is
central to the distributed and cross-textual concep-
tion of genre we propose may be linked to Miller’s
view on social action to better help us grasp genre
innovation.
This we see as a form of “cultural branding” in
which digital tools, technologies, practices of user
generated content and evaluation, circulate online
and back into and out of the world of the woven
and worn. In this view, context is highly, and often
ironically, located within fashion lm as a genre.
Such persuasion is geared towards both reecting
and constituting a form for cultural “appointment”
(not just brands to royalty). In this appointment –
a market and cultural value positioning – fashion
houses and brands become curators of fashion as a
creative industry, using mergers and featherings of
the artistry of fashion and fashion as art. The ensu-
ing content circulation is centred on the curating
of a social semiotics of connections to art events,
galleries and contexts. At the same time, and this is
a crucial cultural co-ecient of sorts, fashion lm
encapsulates trends and features of popular digital
media culture.
Assemblies of ecological relations
Today this is a culture that is distributed. It works
across platforms and it is realised via mobile re-
lations of movement in place and time. The digi-
tal culture in which the innovation in the genre
of fashion lm occurs is riddled with paradoxes:
of relations between seller and self, and between
consumption and production. These paradoxes
are evidenced in a socio-material view of mediated
digital culture that is threaded through with irony
and pastiche. Together these are assembled in eco-
logical relations in and as genre. Genre ecology is a
term that allows us to name, chart and transverse
this complex weave of culture, design, technology,
and media. Thus, the genre of fashion lm needs to
be understood as not only grown out of the Inter-
net, but also as grown into its distributed textual
context to such an extent that the genre cannot be
understood only in terms of the lms themselves.
It is the mesh of text and context, production
and consumption, mediation and annotation that
makes the analysis of fashion lm dicult as a
genre inside a media innovations frame. We hope
that our article has provided some externalisation
of our online viewership, reference to our own ear-
lier work in a social semiotics of digitally mediated
advertising and branding and persuasion.
We see inquiry into media innovation as largely
lacking research that addresses the cultural, the ex-
pressive and the performative. We suggest that un-
derstanding of these aspects may be gleaned from
the creative industries, communication design and
cultural articulations in which multimodal dis-
courses are contextually, economically and politi-
cally prevalent and grounded. They are realised as
a genre of fashion lm online, far from the teeter-
ing heels of the catwalk, yet, nonetheless, still stri-
dently sure that culture matters, not only with eyes
necessarily also cast to visible texture, economic
fabric and underlying foundations.
Media ecologies, genre innovation and the
creative industries
We suggest that fashion lm as an emergent genre
may be fruitfully seen as part of a wider notion of
media ecologies that are apparent in the creative
industries. We argue that fashion lm specically
may be situated in terms of what we label a genre
Skjulstad and Morrison, Fashion Film and Genre Ecology
The Journal of Media Innovations 3.2 (2016) 49
ecology perspective that is media and culturally
framed not merely in terms of collaborative work
activity, but also articulated textually. This perspec-
tive refers to how genre innovation may be con-
ceived as distributed social action across platforms
and meditational contexts, and potential specialist
culture industry domains and media types.
As discussed by Miller (1984), genres can be
conceived as organic constructs, and the rheto-
ric workings of genres as socially situated and as
enablers of social action. Such action may be ex-
tended into a myriad of domains and audiences, as
Miller and Shepherd (2004) demonstrate on blog-
ging. However, a genre ecology view may be under-
stood as interlinked through a distributed combi-
nation of specialist cultures ranging from artists,
creative professionals within the fashion business
to a more general audience within popular culture
who engage with mediated fashion via moving im-
ages. Social action thus also referred to how cul-
tural production is woven into a promotional cul-
ture of branding and into the fabric of peoples lives,
and, as Arvidsson (2006) claims, permeating those
life worlds with consumer culture. When consumer
culture seamlessly blends with cultural produc-
tion across a dense network of tastes relating to
brands, creative professionals, agencies, contexts,
platforms, and formats, the notion of genre ecology
enables us to view genre as an emergent, malleable,
and dynamic – not merely textual, rule driven or
context thick – but also a performative construct
fundamentally linked to social and cultural naviga-
tion and negotiation of tastes and identities.
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