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209
INFS 3 (2) pp. 209–223 Intellect Limited 2016
International Journal of Fashion Studies
Volume 3 Number 2
© 2016 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/infs.3.2.209_1
KEYWORDS
fashion criticism
fashion media
fashion magazines
fashion blogs
sociological critique
MONICA TITTON
University of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria
Fashion criticism unravelled:
A sociological critique of
criticism in fashion media
ABSTRACT
The starting point for this article is the observation that in fashion there is no estab-
lished form of criticism comparable to the art system or the literary system. The
intent of this article is to provide a critical sociological analysis of the relationship
between the fashion industry and fashion media and to trace the limits imposed on
fashion criticism by this mutual structural-economic-dependency. The article exam-
ines the socio-economic and cultural ties between the fashion industry and fashion
media since the nineteenth century to the present and investigates the consequences
of these ties for the development and limits of criticism in fashion journalism. The
article discusses the emergence of a discourse of normative constraint in digital
media and argues that the advent of digital fashion media led to an intensifica-
tion of the economic limitations to fashion criticism. By analysing the conditions
and limitations of criticism in the realm of fashion journalism, the article brings the
literature on fashion media into conversation with critical theory and the sociology
of critique.
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Monica Titton
210 International Journal of Fashion Studies
INTRODUCTION: CRITIQUE AND/OR CRITICISM OF FASHION
The subject of this article is a sociological critique of criticism in fashion media.
The article investigates the topic from two angles: one angle is an examination
of criticism in fashion journalism focusing on the socio-economic and cultural
ties between the fashion industry and fashion media since the nineteenth
century to the present. The other angle is a discussion of the ways in which
digital media have produced a culture of normative constraint and have
concurrently amplified an economic limitation to the formation of criticism in
digital fashion media. By analysing the conditions and limitations of criticism
in the realm of fashion journalism, the article brings the literature on fashion
media into conversation with critical theory and the sociology of critique.
At the beginning of this article it seems necessary to point out a semantic
gap in the translation of the terms criticism and critique, since the majority
of the anglophone literature concerned with notions of criticism and critique
draws on texts written in languages other than English and depends on the
results of translation. In German, French and Italian, the two words ‘criticism’
and ‘critique’ translate as one: ‘Kritik’, ‘critique’ and ‘critica’ respectively, and
they amount to more than the concept of criticism. These terms also include
critique understood as a practice central to modern thought since the publica-
tion of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in 1781 and as a mode of critical philo-
sophical reasoning (Milne 2003: 5). This double meaning of the German word
‘Kritik’ (and the French word ‘critique’) has had consequences for the concep-
tualization and development of forms of philosophical/theoretical critique and
literary and cultural criticism alike (Milne 2003: 6). Critique can be defined
as a philosophical activity that revolves around concepts such as autonomy,
freedom, rationality, equality and progress and, as De Boer and Sonderegger
(2012: 4) point out, is ‘deeply entrenched in the cultural paradigm commonly
referred to as the Enlightenment’. Yet, critique is not confined to the domain
of philosophy, but is part and parcel of everyday forms of reasoning as well
(De Boer and Sonderegger 2012: 3). Criticism on the other hand can be
defined as an evaluative practice, a particular type of aesthetic judgment and a
process of interpretation in cultural fields such as art, literature and – perhaps
– also fashion (McNeil and Miller 2014: l. 103 of 3621). However, the fact
that in English usage there are two words for ‘Kritik’ does not mean that it
is any easier to draw a clear distinction between criticism and critique, since
the difference between the two terms has never been unequivocally defined
(Milne 2003: 5). On the contrary, critique and criticism are two deeply inter-
connected modes of thought and particularly in post-structuralist and critical
theory, philosophical critique is generally combined with literary or textual
criticism (Milne 2003: 6; Couzens-Hoy 2004: 32). The genealogy of both
critique and criticism is the subject of long debates in the humanities, social
sciences and contemporary art that cannot be accommodated within the
limits of this article. The purpose of this article is to concentrate on the socio-
historical and cultural conditions within which criticism in fashion journalism
has come about, and presently occurs, and concomitantly to advance theoriz-
ing on the sociological critique of fashion media.
In recent years, scholarly research on fashion media and fashion journal-
ism has unremittingly grown and fashion media have become an important
area of inquiry in the social sciences, in cultural studies and in fashion stud-
ies (Bartlett, Cole and Rocamora 2013; Jobling 1999; Rocamora 2009a). A vast
body of research on historical fashion and women’s magazines (Hahn 2005;
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Root 2000; Sergio 2010; Völkel 2006; Zika 2006) has been successively comple-
mented by investigations into contemporary fashion media, from magazines
(Crane 1999; Lynge-Jorlén 2012; Matthews 2008; Moeran 2004; Moeran
2015; Rocamora 2006; Rocamora 2009a) to blogs (Rocamora and Bartlett
2009; Findlay 2015; Pham 2011, 2013; Pedroni 2014, 2015; Rocamora 2009b,
2011, 2012, 2013; Titton 2015), films and videos (Khan 2012). The majority of
the existing academic literature on fashion media and women’s magazines
focuses on the ways in which fashion media influence audiences (Blackman
2006; Crane 1999; McCracken 1993); raises questions on how fashion media
and women’s magazines construct collective representations and cultural
discourses concerned with gender, sexuality, body images and race (Bordo
2003; Gough-Yates 2003; Jobling 1999; Matthews 2008; McRobbie 1996;
Rocamora 2009a, 2011; Pham 2011; Twigg 2010); and raises questions on how
fashion media partake in processes of identity construction (Rocamora 2011;
Titton 2015). However, the subject of fashion criticism and critique in fashion
media remains under-researched.
An early attempt to articulate a critique of fashion magazines came from
Roland Barthes who discussed the consumerist bias of fashion magazines at
length in The Fashion System (Barthes 1990 [1967]). Barthes maintained that
the fashion industry needs the production of writing and images in fashion
magazines in order to create the illusion that the newest fashion trend is a
natural fact, not only an economic law, thereby deceiving consumers into
buying new clothes even if they do not need them (Barthes 1990 [1967]: xi).
Barthes’s Marxist critique of fashion magazines has been highly influential for
successive analyses of fashion media, particularly for the critical analysis of
fashion media imageries and representations (McCracken 1993). But because
the focus of his study was on a semiotic analysis of fashion texts, Barthes did
not look into how exactly the structural economic relationship between fash-
ion media and the fashion industry came about. The assumption about the
essentially commercial character of fashion media is a tacit hypothesis in fash-
ion research, yet little scholarly attention has been devoted to the topic and it
still represents a ‘blind spot’ in the academic literature.
The starting point for this article is the observation that in fashion there
is no established institution of criticism comparable to the art system or the
literary system (Davis 1995: 127; McNeil and Miller 2014). From a histori-
cal perspective it is possible to locate the emergence of fashion criticism at
a specific moment in time, namely, in the mid-nineteenth century. McNeil
and Miller (2014) published an extensive study on fashion criticism that calls
into question and explains ‘the dominance of subjective approaches (“opin-
ion”) in contemporary fashion journalism’ (McNeil and Miller 2014: l. 145 of
3621). Their study challenges fashion scholars to consider the issue of fash-
ion criticism in a historical context and opens new perspectives that invite
researchers to develop the field further. McNeil and Miller explore the histori-
cal emergence of a critical vocabulary for fashion journalism in the writings of
Baudelaire, and argue that the persistent predominance of subjective fashion
criticism has its roots in early modern concepts of aesthetic evaluation, which
were adapted to fashion reporting and subsequently to fashion journalism
as a whole genre (McNeil and Miller 2014). Concurrently, the invention of
the camera in the nineteenth century blurred the division between fine and
applied arts and fuelled debates about whether or not these new art forms
could be considered art (McNeil and Miller 2014: l. 166 of 3621). Fashion was
relegated to the realm of applied arts, and ‘new value judgments […] had to
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Monica Titton
212 International Journal of Fashion Studies
be created in order to understand and evaluate new media and formats of
cultural production, which included fashion’ (McNeil and Miller 2014: l. 176
of 3621). But the nineteenth century not only saw the emergence of fashion
criticism. It was also in the nineteenth century that the structural economic
dependency between the fashion industry and fashion media was forged,
which has had equally crucial consequences for the status and limits of fash-
ion criticism ever since. This article is an attempt to delineate the economical
and social reasons that have contributed to the formation of the symbiotic
relationship between the fashion industry and fashion media and explores
how the terms of this relationship have demarcated the limitation of criticism
in fashion.
THE STRUCTURE OF THE ECONOMIC DEPENDENCY BETWEEN
FASHION MEDIA AND THE FASHION INDUSTRY
In the late eighteenth century, fashion magazines were very similar to
general-interest illustrated newspapers. They featured satirical and criti-
cal social commentaries and covered a wide range of topics with very little
space devoted to advertising (Bradford 2014: 38). As Hahn writes, fashion
magazines formed ‘a depository of social and aesthetic mores, customs, and
ideologies’ (Hahn 2005: 208). However, with the growth of the textile and
ready-to-wear industry, by the 1830s fashion columns ‘delineated a new
space of urban consumption for women’ (Hahn 2005: 208), and publicity
and advertising became an important economic pillar for fashion magazines
(Breward 1995: 147). Already in the 1830s, the so-called ‘advertorial’, a blend
of recommendation and advertising, was a widespread journalistic practice in
French fashion magazines. Hahn argues that the advertorial was so popular
because ‘the form of recommendation seemed less commercial and vulgar
than explicit advertising’ (Hahn 2005: 216–17). She points out that when
‘the Journal des dames et des modes began to run […] advertisements in 1837,
many upper-class readers ceased subscriptions, believing that the magazine
should maintain an artistic and literary form of journalism’ (Hahn 2005: 217).
Advertising has been an integral part of the content of fashion magazines
since the late nineteenth century, in response to the growth and technical
advancement of the clothing industry. Breward speaks of an ‘avalanche of
advertising ephemera, mail order initiatives, and magazine publicity stunts’
that characterized the business of fashion from the mid-nineteenth century
onwards (Breward 1995: 147). Hill asserts in a study about advertising in
Vogue from 1890 to 1990 that the introduction of new manufacture models
in the clothing industry in the last quarter of the nineteenth century did
not only fuel the growth and expansion of the fashion industry, but it also
heralded the phenomenon of advertising in fashion magazines and in direct-
mail catalogues (Hill 2007: 5).
When Harper’s Bazaar, the first American fashion magazine, was launched
in 1867, it was one of the first fashion magazines to print advertising. The
commercial model that still dominates fashion magazines across the globe
today was established as early as in the 1890s: ‘Build a huge circulation; sell
loads of advertising space at rates based on that circulation; sell the maga-
zine at a price below the cost of production, and make your profits on ads’
(Ohmann [1996], cited in Hill 2007: 5). When Vogue was launched in 1892
in New York, the close collaboration between fashion journalists, fashion
retailers and advertising was already firmly established and a programmatic
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part of the magazine’s editorial direction since its inception (Hill 2007: 8).
After World War I, advertising expenditures of fashion and women’s maga-
zines increased even further and some magazines launched special depart-
ments with consumer panels and sold market research services to advertisers
(Breward 1995: 203), a fact that obviously solidified the ties between adver-
tisers and fashion magazines. Fashion magazines closed down their market-
research departments when the economic boom of the 1950s enabled the
establishment of autonomous market-research firms (Tungate 2005: 73).
Even though the amount of advertising in fashion magazines has increased
dramatically since the late nineteenth century, it is important to underline
the fact that the interdependencies between the fashion industry and fash-
ion magazines follow a pattern developed in the late nineteenth century
(Bradford 2014: 38) and that this pattern prevails over national and cultural
differences.
The relationship between fashion media and the fashion industry is one
of mutual economic dependence: while the fashion industry needs media to
disseminate its imageries and aesthetic visions and to promulgate its prod-
ucts, fashion media depend on the fashion industry for news, advertising
and sales revenue (McRobbie 1998: 152; Cottle 2003: 32; Bradford 2014: 38).
The economic symbiosis between the industry and media in fashion is one
of the main reasons why the establishment of a form of fashion criticism
within the realms of fashion journalism that is comparable to that of art or
literary criticism has never succeeded (Davis 1995: 127). Attempts at establish-
ing a form of critical, evaluative fashion criticism have only been successful
within the limits of newspapers or general-interest magazines because these
publications are not so dependent on advertising from fashion brands (Abnett
2015; Bradford 2014: 43). The relationship between newspaper journalists
and fashion brands (or better, their PR personnel) is usually very courteous
but it is also distinguished by a fragile balance that can easily be threatened.
Renowned critics like Cathy Horyn (who was a fashion critic at the New York
Times between 1998 and 2014), Suzy Menkes (fashion critic at the International
Herald Tribune between 1988 and 2014) and Hadley Freeman (fashion critic
for The Guardian) have all been banned from attending fashion shows of
brands they had criticized in earlier reviews (Horyn 2008; Freeman 2008).
Banning journalists from shows comes across as somewhat childish attempts
at revenge, particularly because nowadays, as Cathy Horyn remarks, ‘two
hours after a hot show like Prada or Balenciaga anyone, not just reporters, can
pull up images on the Internet and post their opinions on blogs around the
world’ (Horyn 2008). There are numerous reports about newspaper fashion
critics being uninvited from fashion shows, but this is not the case for journal-
ists and editors working for fashion or women’s magazines.
Fashion magazines are commodities in themselves and as such they
serve as hubs for the sale and advertising of other commodities (Moeran
2004: 260). They are an integral part of capitalistic production and consump-
tion processes and propagate the commercial interests of the fashion indus-
try on a national and global scale (Moeran 2004: 260). The field of fashion
publishing is dominated by transnational media corporations that are active
in international publishing with licensing and foreign subsidiaries, such
as Condé Nast (publisher of titles such as Vogue, Teen Vogue, Glamour, W,
Tatler, Vanity Fair) and Hearst (publisher of titles such as Harper’s Bazaar,
Elle, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, Red Book). These media corporations operate
on a global scale in pursuit of maximizing profits and advertising revenue,
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214 International Journal of Fashion Studies
1. For example, in
2014 Italian fashion
designers Domenico
Dolce and Stefano
Gabbana threatened
to pull an estimated
$10 million USD in
advertising from
all of Condé Nast’s
publications because
it had come to their
attention that Vanity
Fair was planning to
write a story about
their tax-evasion
scandal. It is alleged
that after the designers
met with Anna
Wintour – editor-in-
chief of Vogue and
Condé Nast artistic
director – the planned
story was withdrawn
and never published
(Smith 2014).
and they produce products for the largest possible audiences attractive to
advertisers (Gough-Yates 2003: 40).
Hence, advertising comes into view as the economic hinge that connects
fashion media with the fashion industry. Advertising revenue is one of
the main sources of income for fashion-magazine publishers and there-
fore advertising also shapes the editorial content of magazines (Davis 1995:
127; Moeran 2015: 34). As Bradford writes in her book on fashion journal-
ism, ‘it’s hard to exaggerate how crucial advertising is to magazines, and the
lengths to which they’ll go to keep the advertisers happy’ (Bradford 2014:
51). The percentage of advertising in fashion magazines varies from seasons
and national context but on average it takes up between 30 to 60 per cent
of the total pages (Moeran 2004: 262; Moeran 2015: 34). If a brand invests a
large sum of money in advertising pages in a fashion magazine, it is tacitly
assumed that the products from that brand will also be featured in the maga-
zine’s fashion editorials (Abnett 2015; Bradford 2014: 51; Jones 2003). It is
equally expected that the publication will not publish any critical or nega-
tive articles or comments about the brands that bought advertising space in
the magazine, as brands can retaliate by not buying any more advertising
space (Abnett 2015; Aronowsky Cronberg 2014; Bradford 2014: 52; Jones
2003).1 Therefore the distinction between editorial content and advertising
(known as the church–state divide) is far from clear – on the contrary, as
McCracken argues, ‘in most women’s magazines [and fashion magazines]
advertising and editorial content form a continuum’ (McCracken 1993: 135).
As McRobbie argues, based on her interviews with fashion journalists work-
ing in London, people working as freelance or full-time staff writers for fash-
ion publications are very conscious of the limits imposed on their work by
the industry and which stories they can and cannot publish (McRobbie 1998:
152). The participation at sponsored events and paid press trips including
gifts and sojourns at luxurious hotels further strengthens the ties between
journalists and big fashion brands and threatens the critical distance neces-
sary for impartial reporting (McRobbie 1998: 170). The economic dependence
and reciprocity between fashion media and the fashion industry translates
into a power dynamic that very clearly creates a bias in favour of the financial
interests of the big international players in the fashion industry, and to the
detriment of not only small, independent and emerging fashion designers
but also of ‘impartial’ journalism in fashion and women’s magazines. The
visual content of fashion magazines produced by media corporations like
Condé Nast and Hearst is addressed to a transnational, even global audience,
and the same fashion editorial is often published in several national editions.
There are of course big differences between fashion magazines from differ-
ent countries in terms of their content and their editorial direction, but the
programmatic overlaps between editorial and commercial content override
any national and cultural differences.
Not only does the content of fashion magazines reflect the factual inter-
dependency between the fashion industry and fashion media, but the blurred
boundaries between these two realms are also reflected in labour practices
and social structures, particularly within the women’s and fashion maga-
zine business. The magazine business has undergone a profound transfor-
mation since the 1980s due to the rise of post-Fordist industrial flexibility
and free-market entrepreneurial culture, technological innovation in produc-
tion processes and the drive to cut costs (Gough-Yates 2003: 53; McRobbie
1998: 160). This transformation affected and changed the labour conditions
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and practices of journalists working for women’s and fashion magazines: one
the one hand, a few members of full-time staff were given more manage-
rial responsibilities and on the other hand, many contracted staff members
were forced into freelance status (Gough-Yates 2003: 47). McRobbie showed
that the majority of fashion journalists work on a freelance basis and often
combine their journalistic work with other employments, from writing copy
for advertising agencies, PR agencies or fashion brands; consultancy work for
fashion brands; or other, similar jobs in the fashion sector (McRobbie 1998:
160). Because of the high degree of job mobility across various segments of
the fashion system, McRobbie speaks of fashion journalism as a ‘fluid field’
characterized by overlapping interests, reciprocal interdependency, shared
social networks and cultural values (McRobbie 1998: 151). Furthermore,
McRobbie argues that as a feminized space, fashion journalism tends to be
ostracized by other news departments, with the consequence that there is a
higher degree of social cohesion among fashion professional across differ-
ent sectors (design, journalism, PR, education) than in other cultural fields
(McRobbie 1998: 152). As a consequence of the distribution of economic
power between fashion media and the fashion industry, the lines between
advertising and editorial content in fashion media are blurred, a fact that is
reflected in intersecting employment structures with many potential conflicts
of interest. Rather than thinking of fashion media and the fashion industry
as two distinct fields, therefore, it seems more appropriate to imagine them
as two interdependent, internally related entities (Bradford 2014: 35) charac-
terized by unclear boundaries and interlocking financial interests, carried out
through the joint production of collective narratives, media imageries and
identificatory spaces.
SHIFTING TERRITORIES: THE DIGITAL TURN AND FASHION MEDIA
The rise of fashion blogs and digital fashion media in the past decade has
brought into question long-established hierarchies, economic structures and
patterns of cultural influence. With many younger readers switching to, for
the most part, free fashion and street-style blogs, websites or e-magazines,
print fashion magazines have been confronted with a steady decline in circu-
lation revenue and advertising revenue for years from which they are only
slowly recovering by diversifying their media outlets and upgrading their
digital contents (Bradford 2014: 41–42; Pham 2013: 252). The ‘digital turn’
in fashion has rearranged, as Pham observed, ‘the economic configuration
of the fashion commodity system from material to immaterial commodities
and from industrial manufacturing to the media and market consumption
habits of online consumers’ (Pham 2013: 252). On fashion blogs, individual
practices of self-fashioning combined with autobiographical texts are broad-
casted online. Street-style blogs differ from personal style and fashion blogs
insofar as they concentrate on the documentation of individual metropolitan
fashion practices. Both fashion and street-style blogs present contemporary
subjectivity as an aspirational, individualistic lifestyle choice and produce
content that pertains to the realm of fashion media imagery and that circu-
lates as collective narratives (Rocamora and Bartlett 2009; Rocamora 2009a).
Fashion bloggers, who produce their own fashion/lifestyle media universes,
have created new spaces for the enactment of fashionable identities and have
expanded the media territories of fashionable representations (Rocamora
2009a, 2011; Titton 2015). Today, fashion bloggers and fashion Instagrammers
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Monica Titton
216 International Journal of Fashion Studies
2. For many fashion
bloggers, Instagram
has become their
most important
communication
channel and they use
the social network in
a very similar way to
blogs, consequently
Instagram is
increasingly replacing
blogs (Vingan Klein
2014; Pedroni,
Sanmiguel and Sábada
2015).
3. For instance, the
American Federal
Trade Commission’s
guidelines concerning
endorsements state
clearly that bloggers
must disclose if there is
a material connection
(i.e. a monetary
or non-monetary
remuneration such as
gifts) between them
and the brands they
feature on their blogs:
‘When there exists a
connection between
the endorser and the
seller of the advertised
product that might
materially affect the
weight or credibility of
the endorsement (i.e.
the connection is not
reasonably expected
by the audience), such
connection must
be fully disclosed’
(http://goo.gl/EpMPZb.
Accessed 1 March 2016).
have become important gatekeepers in the field of fashion communication,
notwithstanding that their position in the fashion industry, the definition of
their role and their occupational profile are in continuous flux (Pedroni 2014,
2015).
The ascent to influence and power of fashion and street-style bloggers
throughout the past approximately ten years will not be addressed here,
the readers are directed to dedicated publications (Berry 2010; Findlay 2015;
Rocamora 2009b; Rocamora and Bartlett 2009). It should suffice to remark
that the relationship between people working for traditional fashion media
and fashion bloggers and Instagrammers2 has been characterized by rivalry,
suspicion and even hostility (Pedroni 2014: 97). After initial scepticism the
fashion industry quickly recognized the influence of fashion bloggers on
consumers, and after inviting them to fashion shows and publicity events
many fashion brands started commercial collaborations with fashion bloggers,
street-style bloggers and people featured on street-style blogs (Titton 2013:
130). On the one hand, the economic involvement with the fashion industry
contributed to a professionalization of fashion blogs, as the financial support
helped bloggers to build and expand their business (Pedroni 2015). On the
other hand, economically successful fashion bloggers like Suzy Lau, Chiara
Ferragni and Jane Alridge were accused of ‘selling out’ and disparaged for
their lack of critical judgement (Pedroni 2014: 97). In a much-quoted article
in the International Herald Tribune, Suzy Menkes reprimanded fashion blog-
gers like Bryan Boy, Susie Lau and Tavi Gavinson for openly accepting gifts
from designers and admonished fashion brands for their attempts to ‘to claw
back control lost to multimedia’ by trying to buy the endorsement of fashion
bloggers with handbags and clothes (Menkes 2013). Part of that criticism was
absolutely justified – despite advertising rules requiring bloggers to disclose
any paid endorsement,3 not all bloggers adhere to those rules and readers are
left wondering whether or not that passionate post about a pair of sandals
was sponsored – ‘genuine’ or ‘fake’, so to speak.
However, there is hypocrisy in the criticism aimed at bloggers from estab-
lished fashion journalists because they effectively castigate bloggers for trying
to monetize their activity and thus, for attempting to build a career in the fash-
ion industry. Bloggers are used as scapegoats for their commercial involve-
ment with fashion brands, and at the same time, journalistic fashion criticism
printed in newspapers or in fashion magazines is idealized as ‘objective’ and
the only legitimate form of fashion criticism (Pedroni 2014: 97). Those who
reproach fashion bloggers for landing advertising deals usually fail to mention
the aforementioned structural economic dependency between the fashion
industry and fashion media.
Yet it must be said that in general, most of the economically successful
fashion bloggers indeed produce affirmative and descriptive texts when they
review fashion shows or specific products, but the main narrative focus lies
in the representation of fashion in the blogger’s lifeworld and that of their
potential readers (Titton 2015: 205). The production of texts has anyway
become of secondary importance and the majority of personal style and
fashion bloggers have switched their main focus away from writing to self-
modelled fashion spreads that are then published simultaneously on their
blog and on Instagram (Pedroni, Sanmiguel and Sábada 2015). The predomi-
nance of photography over text and the lack of criticism are narrative attrib-
utes that blogs share with fashion magazines, and this progressive adjustment
of fashion blogs to the conventions of fashion publishing is the result of the
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strengthening commercial ties between the fashion industry and fashion
bloggers (Pedroni 2015: 181).
FASHION BLOGS, NETIQUETTE AND THE NORMATIVE CONSTRAINT
OF CRITICISM
When in the nineteenth century it was the expansion of the textile industry
that caused a proliferation of fashion publications, the explosion of fashion
blogs since the mid-2000s is related to the growth of the digital economy and
the globalization of the fashion industry. Within the current socio-economic
environment, fashion bloggers come into view as the purest incarnations of
the ideal neoliberal subjects: they embrace flexibility, prosper thanks to social
media networks and mobilize their ‘entrepreneurial self’ through self-brand-
ing (Pham 2011: 16; Titton 2015: 217). The rise of fashion blogs and digital
fashion media takes place within a specific configuration of neoliberal capital-
ism, which, as Boltanski and Chiapello discuss, fosters new forms of labour
based on a high value of temporary projects, flexibility and innovations, and
on notions of self-management and self-surveillance (Boltanski and Chiapello
2005 [1999]: 75). The booming economy of Silicon Valley, with its flat hierar-
chies, flexible specializations and rooftop basketball courts, is a perfect exam-
ple of this phase of capitalistic production (Fraser 2013: 220). As constantly
networking, flexible, mobile, individualized and self-branded entrepreneurs,
fashion bloggers embody neoliberal formations of subjectivity and their career
model fits seamlessly into the order of network capitalism (Boltanski and
Chiapello 2005 [1999]). The success of a few fashion and street-style bloggers
is devoted not only to their work and the fact that they embrace the digi-
tal economy, but also to the existence of a mass of contestants who create a
competitive, yet unequal environment. Boltanski and Chiapello argue that ‘in
a connexionist world, where high status presupposes displacement, great men
derive part of their strength from the immobility of the little people, which is
the source of their poverty’ (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005 [1999]: 363). Under
the conditions of socio-economic and spatial inequalities, a few fashion and
street-style bloggers thrive thanks to a great mass of aspiring fellow bloggers
who do not dispose of the sufficient financial, cultural, social and symbolic
capital necessary to succeed in the digital economy. A closer discussion of the
parameters determining the ‘success’ of a fashion blog reveals that the capi-
talization of networks analysed by Boltanski and Chiapello is indeed key to
their fame and inhibits their critical potential.
Writing a comment on a highly popular blog or Instagram feed like The
Sartorialist or Style Bubble is employed by many aspiring fashion, style, food
or lifestyle bloggers as an economic activity. Commenting is often utilized as
a tactic to attract the attention of other users, and not so much to express
an opinion or to participate in a discussion. Bloggers ‘sign’ their comments
with their blog’s URL, inviting others to ‘check out their blog’ (or they leave
a comment on Instagram with the plea to have a look at their feed, or to
trade ‘likes for likes’). A similar strategy consists of leaving comments on fash-
ion blogs or Instagram feeds that are comparable to one’s own and to ask
the blog’s author/Instagrammer to return the favour of commenting, thus
creating and exploiting a network of reciprocal actions. The ‘commentary’
function on blogs is a pillar of so-called Web 2.0 structures, and is said to
facilitate two-way communication between readers and users. Yet on fash-
ion blogs, this potential space for debate and criticism has become mostly an
INFS_3.2_Titton_209-223.indd 217 10/7/16 10:23 AM
Monica Titton
218 International Journal of Fashion Studies
economic affair. The comments on fashion blogs are almost always exaggerat-
edly positive and as such they are reminiscent of the mellifluous ‘letters from
our readers’ section in print fashion magazines, which, as Rocamora shows,
mainly serve to strengthen ‘the link that unites “Vogue” to its readership’
(Rocamora 2006: 157). The comments from readers, or better, users, have
taken on a new meaning and value in the fashion blogosphere. Any type of
(potentially) reciprocal interaction online is framed by the normative code-of-
conduct of the so-called ‘blogging etiquette’ or ‘netiquette’. Already in 2009,
the website Independent Fashion Bloggers featured a ‘crash course in blogger
etiquette’, written by a fashion blogger. The list contained advice for blog-
gers ranging from picture copyrights to writing e-mails, and included tips on
leaving comments. Bloggers are explicitly encouraged to establish reciprocal
relationships through commenting, and comments are framed by a normative
emotional discourse, as the following excerpt shows:
Comment back: If someone comments on your blog, make time to visit
their blog. It’s nice to get to know your readers. If you have time, leave
them a comment, too (you know that warm fuzzy feeling you get inside
when someone leaves you a comment? Rack up some good karma by
doing the same for someone else!)
[…]
Negative comments (giving them). I usually go by this rule: If you have
nothing nice to say, don’t say anything at all.
(Independent Fashion Bloggers 2009)
The blogging etiquette and similar attempts to regulate people’s behaviour
on blogs are ultimately subsumed under an economic logic. This is because
in the fashion blogosphere, the various potentially reciprocal activities are
carried out in and through expanding networks and centre around the goal
of maximizing user traffic, which is closely monitored due to in-built statis-
tical metrics (Marwick 2013: 103). Consistently high numbers of user traffic
are the basis for deals with potential advertisers, which constitutes the main
source of income for most professional fashion bloggers (Stankeviciute 2013:
82). Comments are just another indicator of high user traffic and have become
a kind of online currency, which has led to an instrumentalization of many
conversations held on blogs.
The fact that the fortune of individual fashion bloggers is made possi-
ble through the investment of many agents into reciprocal networks echoes
the status of success as a defining category of action in contemporary capi-
talism, which draws its normative justification from the notion of reciprocal
justice (Neckel 2008: 98). In this contemporary ‘culture of success’, the attain-
ment of high social status does not request cultural refinement anymore, as
argued by Bourdieu, but relies increasingly on material and economic capital,
which is defined in terms of ‘success’ (Neckel 2008: 48). Fashion and street-
style bloggers constantly deal with this normative pre-eminence of success that
is even more amplified within the realm of digital culture, where, as Marwick
(2013: 14) notes, ‘status is predicated on the cultural logic of celebrity, accord-
ing to which the highest value is given to mediation, visibility, and attention’.
The fashion blogosphere is obsessed with the idea of ‘making it’ as a blog-
ger, and the stories of successful fashion and street-style bloggers – reported
in widely read publications such as The Business of Fashion – are always stories
INFS_3.2_Titton_209-223.indd 218 10/7/16 10:23 AM
Fashion criticism unravelled
www.intellectbooks.com 219
4. http://girlwithcurves.
com; http://
archedeyebrow.
com; http://www.
fashionloveand-
martinis.com; http
gabifresh.com.
Accessed 1 March
2016.
about economic success (e.g. brand collaborations, advertising campaigns, etc.),
apparently the ultimate goal of those who launch a fashion or street-style blog.
What we are witnessing in the digital-fashion-media sphere today is ulti-
mately a reproduction of the same business model already established for
fashion magazines and an inclusion of fashion blogs into the ‘symbiotic rela-
tionship’ (Bradford 2014: 35) between the fashion industry and fashion media,
characterized by mutual economic dependencies and shared interests over
cultural influence.
CONCLUSION: RE-VISIONING CRITICISM AND CRITIQUE IN FASHION
MEDIA
The intent of this article was to provide a critical sociological analysis of the
relationship between the fashion industry and fashion media and to trace
the limits imposed on fashion criticism by their mutual structural-economic-
dependency. The article shows that the lack of criticism in print and digi-
tal fashion media that are relying on advertising revenue from the fashion
industry, is the result of the negotiation between commercial interests and
journalistic freedom. A comprehensive sociological analysis of fashion criti-
cism would go well beyond the scope of this article and would necessitate an
in-depth study and comparison of various forms of historical and contem-
porary fashion journalism. The limitations of this article lie in the negligence
of a closer textual analysis of fashion journalism from various media outlets,
including fashion journalism published in newspapers and diverse fashion
blogs. By examining the economic, social and cultural aspects determining the
absence of criticism in fashion media, the article however represents the first
step towards an extensive sociological critique of criticism in fashion media.
In the introduction of this article, a few broad definitions of critique and
criticism were presented. In conclusion, I would like to return to the point of
departure and propose an alternative meaning of critique with the help of Bruno
Latour, who tried to recalibrate the definition of critique in a widely discussed
article entitled ‘Why has critique run out of steam?’ (2004). Latour concluded that
the critic is not the one who debunks, but the one who assembles. The
critic is not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of the naïve
believers, but the one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather.
(Latour 2004: 246)
Latour’s argument is that a dialectical critique of society in the tradition of
the Frankfurt School has lost its cultural power, and today only demysti-
fies and deconstructs reality but never produces anything new (Latour 2004:
229). In this vein, this article is concluded by taking a glimpse at new media,
from blogs to online magazines that were created in the past few years, and
that represent an immanent critique of fashion by producing representa-
tions that counteract the heteronormative, mainly white, western narra-
tives of fashion. In the context of globalization, the system of fashion with
its capacity for creating identificatory spaces through its media has also
opened and expanded spaces for the production of countercultural and post-
colonial representations of identities, bodies and styles (Gaugele and Titton
2014: 169). There are ‘fatshion’ blogs like Girl with Curves, Arched Eyebrow or
Fashion, Love, and Martinis, who reclaim the depiction of corpulent women
in the fashion industry and support fat- and body-positive politics.4 There
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Monica Titton
220 International Journal of Fashion Studies
5. http://www.daysofdoll.
com; http://hijablicious.
com. Accessed 1 March
2016.
6. http://www.
ecofashiontalk.com;
http://www.liveeco.
co.za/fashion; http://
evolvedfashion.com.
Accessed 1 March 2016.
are modest fashion blogs like Days of Doll or Hijablicious dedicated to a non-
orientalistic representation of religious dress and fashions (Lewis 2015).5
There are DIY- or eco-fashion e-zines like Eco Fashion Talk or Evolved Fashion
that criticize the exploitative, damaging and oppressive labour conditions and
production processes of the fashion industry by promoting self-made, recy-
cled or up-cycled fashion and styles.6
These examples show that fashion blogs and fashion magazines can
themselves become instruments of critique by creating their own, non-
stereotypical, fashionable representations of racial, ethnic, sexual and gender
diversity by including previously excluded or overlooked subject positions,
practices and bodies into the visual narratives and representations of fash-
ion media. Inevitably, sooner or later these representations and practices
will be reintegrated into the commercial order of fashion and go through
the process of commodification. But for now, these blogs are the result of
a social, political and aesthetic critique of fashion and are not only expand-
ing the landscape of fashion media imagery but also the grounds for fashion
criticism itself.
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SUGGESTED CITATION
Titton, M. (2016), ‘Fashion criticism unravelled: A sociological critique of
criticism in fashion media’, International Journal of Fashion Studies, 3: 2,
pp. 209–23, doi: 10.1386/infs.3.2.209_1
CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Monica Titton is a sociologist and culture critic living and working in Vienna
(Austria). She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Vienna (2015).
She is a lecturer at the University of Applied Arts and at the Academy of Fine
Arts in Vienna, where she lectures across a number of areas concerning socio-
logical theory, fashion history, cultural studies and fashion theory. In addition
to her scholarly work, she regularly writes about fashion, culture and digital
media for newspapers and magazines.
E-mail: monica.titton@gmx.net
Monica Titton has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that
was submitted to Intellect Ltd.
INFS_3.2_Titton_209-223.indd 223 10/7/16 10:23 AM
www.intellectbooks.com
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