Fashioning the City: Paris, Fashion and the Media
... It situates photography as a sub-genre of visual representation with its own particularities, owing in part to the fallacy of photographic 'truth'. Chapter 2 then situates fashion photography within the broader category of 'fashion media discourse' (Rocamora 2009). The idea of discourse is linked to gendered subjects through the work of Foucault and Butler, with Butler's notion of discursive performativity being of particular value. ...
... The symbolic production of fashion Fashion in the West is never solely about material production; it also involves symbolic production: that is, the process of making things mean (Briggs 2013;Rocamora 2001Rocamora , 2009). 1 In fact, one might argue that symbolic production precedes the material production of fashion, as Roland Barthes does in The Fashion System (1990[1967). He notes the 'constitutive' nature of fashion writing before stating that 'without discourse there is no total Fashion, no essential Fashion' (xi). ...
... 3 The supreme importance of symbolic production to the fashion industry makes 'the fashion press […] central to the field of fashion, to the definition and consecration of its many agents and institutions' (Rocamora 2009: xiv). Yet in spite of the centrality of symbolic production to the fashion industry as a whole, scholarship on the fashion media remains limited (Rocamora 2009). The same issue applies to fashion photography, more specifically (Shinkle 2008;Williams 1998). ...
The childlike character of ideal femininities has long been critiqued in feminist literature,
from Mary Wollstonecraft (1792) to Susan Faludi (1992). Yet, despite the partial gains of
feminism the ‘woman-child’ continues to be a prominent subject-position in fashion
photography of the West. This thesis builds upon earlier feminist critiques of childlike
femininity by considering the meaning of childlike femininities in the period spanning
1990 to 2015. In particular, it questions whether representations of childlike femininities
can shed their dehumanising, ‘second sex’ connotations and be resignified to a more
progressive end in the contemporary context. The possible appeal of childlike subject-positions to women, following several waves of feminism, is explored through reception
studies carried out with female participants in focus groups, as well as theory on the
‘female gaze’.
Images were principally drawn from three British fashion magazines: Vogue (UK),
i-D, and Lula. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, this thesis
demonstrates the ways in which discourses on childhood, girlhood and womanhood
overlap and intersect to produce the figure of the ‘woman-child’ in the fashion media and
beyond. This subject-position is shown not to be singular but rather as appearing in a
number of guises. The many permutations of childlike femininity are subsumed into four
overarching categories: the Romantic woman-child; the femme-enfant-fatale; Lolita
style; and the Parodic woman-child. This thesis thereby contributes to existing debates in
fashion studies by considering in greater detail the different discourses on childhood and
femininity that come into play when women are positioned as childlike.
A multi-faceted visual methodology is employed, combining visual analysis of
imagery with experimental reception studies. Reception studies were conducted in focus
groups with female participants and provide insight into the way these women made
sense of the ‘woman-child’. In addition, they provide an indication as to whether the
participants liked or disliked childlike femininities in the fashion media, thus pointing to
the possible investments women might have in childlike subject-positions. Finally,
including an element of social research served to challenge and/or reinforce the
researcher’s own readings of the imagery, pointing to new avenues of research and
expanding the discursive field of enquiry. This aspect of the thesis makes a
methodological contribution to literature on the reception of still media imagery in
fashion studies, magazine studies and feminist media studies.
... The image or representation of cities resulting from this process are then communicated and disseminated through gatekeepers, particularly traditional and more modern media (e.g., journalists, social networks, bloggers), through a variety of channels including social media networks like Twitter (Rocamora, 2009;Currid and Williams, 2010;Crewe, 2013). Due their widespread diffusion amongst both gatekeepers and the general public, social media have become an important tool for exploring cities' representation and draw conclusions on the prior image-making process and the subsequent formation of place-based associations. ...
... Since the late nineteenth, the emergence of a modern media system has played a key role in the image-building process of London, New York, Milan and Paris. Moreover, over time, the fashion industry has developed strong inter-dependencies with other CCIs, such as music, photography, media, arts, film, television and advertisement, which have helped these cities to sustain their position in the 'symbolic economy' for fashion (Rantisi, 2004;Rocamora, 2009;Tokatli, 2012). The second group of tweets exclusively refers to fashion designers, whereas the third cluster mainly deals with typology, processes and characteristics of production in the industry. ...
... The first factor helps explain 74% of the thematic variance, whereas the second factor explains 20% of the data variability. (Rocamora, 2009;Jansson and Power, 2010;Godart, 2014). Moreover, they both have a long-established tradition in artisanal production particularly renewed for its highquality, innovation and creativity, and are described in the literature as cities characterized by a reputation 'congealed in their products' because of strong local cultural traditions and symbologies that enrich them with local authenticity (Scott, 2008: 94). ...
The creative and cultural industries form an important part of many urban economies, and the fashion industries are one of the exemplar creative industries. Because fashion is based on intangibles such as branding and reputation, it tends to have a two-way relationship with cities: urban areas market themselves through their fashion industry, while the fashion industry draws heavily on the representation of place. In this paper we investigate this inter-linked relationship between the fashion industry and place in four of the major cities of global fashion – London, New York, Milan, and Paris – using data from the social media platform Twitter. To do this, we draw upon a variety of computer-aided text analysis (CATA) techniques – including cluster, correspondence and specificity analyses – to examine almost 100,000 tweets collected during the Spring-Summer fashion weeks of February and March 2018. We find considerable diversity in how these cities are represented. Milan and Paris are seen in terms of national fashion houses, artisanal production and traditional institutions such as galleries and exhibitions. New York is focused on media and entertainment, independent designers and a ‘buzzy’ social life. London is portrayed in the most diverse ways, with events, shopping, education, social movements, political issues and the royal family all prominent. In each case, the historical legacy and built environment form important parts of the city’s image. However, there is considerable diversity in representation. We argue that social media allows a more democratic view of the way cities are represented than other methodologies.
... Fashion and dress practices interpret both the utopia and the reality of a place. Rocamora (2009) borrows the words of Barthes to tell us, also, that cities are both a discursive and phenomenological reality, from where different narratives can be taken as perceptions and representations are shaped. In the case of Colombia, the narrative of the entire country led to an overall discourse that affected all the scales (politics, daily life, dress practices) and as such was represented to the world. ...
... Though the laudable intentions expressed by Marroquin, the material production resulting of his company becomes problematic when not analyzed or filtered, resulting in sales that perpetuate the existing ideal of Escobar, as symbolic production is not the result of only one institution or individual, but the field of production itself (Rocamora, 2009). The symbolism of the image of Escobar, and everything related to him remains a negative one despite the attempts to change it. ...
... Tropical designs but also incorporating places as part of their discourse, defined as a space of knowledge with a wide constituency of layered nodes of ideas, themes and concepts that go across various disciplines (Rocamora, 2009). ...
The aesthetic of the Colombian woman has been permeated by a variety of factors, including geography and economic aspects. However, the strongest influence in the shaping of how the Colombian woman dresses and presents herself to the world has come from the most delicate moment on the economic and social history of the country: the era of the drug cartels. ‘Narcoculture’ took over society, permeating the fashion discourse and the aesthetics of Colombian women. Voluptuous bodies, tight dresses, revealing clothes and bright colors were the norm among the ‘narco’ women, female companions for the drug lords of the big cartels, always surrounded by eccentricity. However, in the past ten years, Colombia has been experiencing a shift in its social dynamics due to different peace processes, as well as major marketing campaigns to promote the country as a destination and a source for cultural economies and creatives industries, a boom that has attracted major attention from the world. Fashion, as a response, has also reshaped its aesthetic to find itself more aligned with the global scene of the industry, while incorporating the basic elements of South American fashion construction. The result is a new Colombian fashionista, presented as a tropical luxurious woman, yet empowered and global, that is conquering the biggest media outlets and retailers, but that only represents a small elite group of the women in the country and their dress practices.
By interviewing designers and developing a visual analysis of items that represent this pivot of the industry, this paper studies the evolution of Colombian aesthetics and how the current political and social moment of the country is mediated in the work of designers, reshaping the imagery and symbolism of Colombian fashion to the global industry, by forming a new narrative that has been accepted through different authorities of the field. It analyzes the motivation of national designers to create this new fashion persona, and the impact that it has created in the international fashion industry, as well as questioning the social moment in which this is happening and the controversies that this new flourishment of Colombian design has brought to the country and its national industry.
... To date there has, however, been little critical engagement with what these exhibitions mean for public understanding of the fashion cities in which they are located. The growing presence of fashion within museums over the past fifty years raises important questions about the role such institutions play in creating and perpetuating the discursive narratives about ideas of creativity, exclusivity, and cultural capital that form and sustain the reputations of fashion cities (Casadei and Gilbert 2018;Rocamora 2009). In order to begin to answer these questions, this paper explores how London's museums, and in particular the V&A, came to be significant spaces within the fashion city. ...
... Producing this symbolic capital relies on a broad network of fashionable actors. For example, Paris-the most iconic fashion city of the past two hundred years-may have symbolic capital powerful enough to imbue fashion products with a heightened desirability and authenticity (Power and Scott 2004, 7), but, as Agnès Rocamora (2009) has discussed, this power lies as much with the media, literature, and film industries, who create symbolic value through their discourses, as it does with the designer brands and the Fédération Française de la Couture. ...
As the commodity chains supporting the fashion industry have become ever more global and complex, so the work of constructing and maintaining the reputations of fashion cities such as London has also needed to evolve. Museums have played a key role in this process through their dissemination of discursive narratives about the places, spaces, and people that constitute London’s symbolic fashion capital. Taking the Victoria and Albert Museum as a primary case study, this paper explores how changes to the networks and processes of the fashion city in the decades following the Second World War were connected to the growth of fashion within the museum. Looking at two key exhibitions: Britain Can Make It (1946) and Fashion: An Anthology (1971), it traces how the museum responded to processes of deindustrialization and cultural change by bringing the city’s commercial fashion cultures into the museum space, resulting in the museum becoming an important site for the fashion city. Finally, it asks whether the legacy of this process has resulted in increasingly narrow and homogenous fashion exhibitions that have the potential to harm London’s fashionable reputation by excluding many of the diverse networks and places that make the city’s fashion culture unique.
... In this way, 'the spectacle is the catalyst for culture making, negotiating the threshold between form and event' (Kessler 2015). Rocamora (2009) describes fashion discourse 'as made up of a set of values, assumptions and rules that are dominant at a certain time and at a certain place in the field they are produced and reproduced in' indicating the agency of fashion to influence cultures of cherishing or of discarding the 'products' of nature and human endeavour. The creation of meaning is an iterative process involving an individual and an audience able to understand the visual cues, a 'knowing community', in fashion usually with in an urban context. ...
... However, such is the power of fashion 'as a signifier of urban modernity and of world status' (Yusuf and Wu 2002), that even though production now predominantly takes place elsewhere, processes of fashion branding and city branding continue to be codependent (Rocamora 2009). Fashionable is often less about the distinction of product and more about the theatre of retail. ...
Some 900 years ago, an extraordinary occurrence is said to have taken place on market day in the English Midlands town of Coventry; a noble lady rode through the town, on horseback, adorned solely by her hair, which was long enough to ensure her modesty. The apparent outcome of this spectacle was the rescinding of a repressive tax on the city’s citizens, whom Lady Godiva sought to support. Whether this is fact or fable, fashion, as city spectacle has long held cultural and political significance; an emotive force, it affects those directly involved and a wider society.
Whilst a longstanding citizen of London, a megacity recognized throughout the world as a site of fashion creation and public performance, my intrigue in fashion as a city spectacle dates from my childhood in a small village. Insights came monthly, delivered by post, in the form of a bunch of pages in landscape format, stapled together to form iD magazine, capturing images of fashion’s everyday spectacles on its streets: the shapes, forms and encounters of time, place and culture. This arresting visual commentary shared the concerns, allegiances, excitements and anger felt by the city at that time. Fashion evidenced more than what people were wearing: it also made clear what they were thinking and feeling, representing those who felt unrepresented elsewhere. Since then, through my work as a designer, researcher and educator, I have sought ways in which fashion’s ability to give voice to the unrepresented and the unspoken, and its ability to celebrate all that our shared planet and shared humanity offers, can become an intrinsic part of fashion’s design.
... The two types of analyses are put in dialogue with each other to provide a multi-layered understanding of the fashionalization of mobile phones, including a grand picture of this phenomenon as well as a micro and detailed investigation into the visual features of individual images. We focus on the images of mobile phones and their accompanying texts extracted from Vogue (US) and L'Officiel (FR), since these magazines have a central role in the fashion system (Van Der Laan and Kuipers 2016b; Rocamora 2009). ...
... The second magazine we selected is L'Officiel (FR). As a key institution in the French fashion scene, L'Officiel (FR) has played a crucial role in constructing the discourse of Paris as a fashion capital (Rocamora 2009). Considering the importance of Paris for the modern fashion industry, L'Officiel is a good example of mainstream, non-English fashion magazines. ...
We asked when and how mobile phones are represented in Vogue (US) and L’Officiel (FR) between 1993 and 2017, and in what sense their presence in such magazines can be understood as making them into fashion items. The question is warranted since these magazines act as critical gatekeepers to fashion, at the same time as it has been argued that the latter is spreading its influence from clothes to other objects. We study the occurrence, changing styles and visual aesthetics of phones through a quantitative and a qualitative analysis. The former shows mobile phones did appear in the magazines, indicating that the important gatekeepers allow these devices to enter the fashion world. The qualitative analysis reveals that the aesthetic representation of mobile phones both conforms to and diverges from how garments are aestheticized in these magazines. The overall picture is one of a fluctuating and heterogeneous relation, with intermittent and temporary interactions between fashion gatekeeping and the digital devices. When carefully studying the interest in displaying the digital objects in these magazines we see a rather limited influence and not a trend.
... The Eiffel Tower is arguably the most significant symbol of Paris fashion. As Rocamora (2009) argues, "The city as a whole does not actually need to be represented, only its monumental symbol (p. 172)." ...
... According to the brand's guideline, the shooting should include iconic buildings or landmarks that could be easily identified as Paris, but the incorporation of the site into the images should not be too obvious, and should only show parts of the landmark buildings in order to avoid the impression of 'tourist photos'. The brands do not want to convey a direct appropriation of an existing Paris symbol, otherwise, this could be easily achieved by choosing signature monomental symbol (Rocamora, 2009). The responsibility of cultural interpretation was given to the on-site aesthetic judgement of the image production team including the stylist, and the photographer in creating the 'mise-en-scene' of a moody Parisian impression. ...
... Al mismo tiempo, el auge de los influencers y creadores de contenido digital ha llevado la moda a un nivel de hiperexposición, donde la validación y el reconocimiento dependen en gran medida de la capacidad de seguir las tendencias más recientes (Rocamora, 2011). En plataformas como Instagram y TikTok, las tendencias cambian con una rapidez sin precedentes, estableciendo un nuevo paradigma en el que el estilo se renueva constantemente y la presión por la actualización es permanente. ...
El presente artículo de revisión de carácter ensayístico examina el impacto de la moda en la salud y su papel en el desarrollo social desde una perspectiva interdisciplinaria. A partir del análisis de fuentes bibliográficas especializadas en sociología, psicología, medicina y economía, se exploran los efectos que las tendencias de la moda pueden generar en el bienestar físico y mental de los individuos, así como su influencia en la construcción de la identidad y las dinámicas socioculturales. Se discuten los beneficios de la moda como medio de expresión personal y cultural, su impacto en la autoestima y su papel en la evolución de las normas sociales. Sin embargo, también se abordan los riesgos asociados a la imposición de estándares estéticos inalcanzables, el uso de prendas perjudiciales para la salud y la presión social que puede derivar en trastornos de la imagen corporal y problemas psicológicos. Además, se analiza la dimensión económica de la moda, destacando su influencia en la globalización, el consumismo y las condiciones laborales en la industria textil. A partir de esta revisión, se plantea la necesidad de promover un enfoque más consciente y sostenible en el consumo de moda, impulsando prácticas responsables en el diseño, producción y comercialización de indumentaria. Finalmente, se reflexiona sobre la importancia de una educación en moda que fomente el bienestar individual y colectivo, equilibrando la creatividad y la identidad personal con el cuidado de la salud y el impacto social.
... Quest'autenticità ttizia prevede una serie di strategie sia estetiche che linguistiche: le prime includono la pubblicazione di foto di out t che non siano troppo patinate (Duffy, Hund 2015), […] e l'utilizzo di specchi per scattare sel e, a simboleggiare il realismo e l'immediatezza degli scatti (Rocamora 2009). ...
... These cities have changed markedly since the late-twentieth century, particularly in response to economic globalization, accentuating separation between material and symbolic forms of production. The contraction of manufacturing has shifted these global cities towards a post-industrial economy of design, creative and symbolic activities (Jansson and Power 2010;Merlo and Polese 2006;Rantisi 2004;Rocamora 2009). While there are commonalities, notably in the importance of biannual fashion collections and their significance in the symbolic geographies of the fashion media, these 'capitals' have distinctively different fashion ecosystems and development paths (Casadei and Gilbert 2018). ...
In response to globalization of traditional manufacturing and the growing significance of a symbolic economy, fashion cities are now formed by different mixings of material, design/creative and symbolic forms of production. The intersection between these elements is particularly evident in the global fashion cities, which have experienced a profound process of deindustrialization and a shift between manufacturing and symbolic economies. This paper explores London’s relationship with fashion through the perspectives of key industry actors. We draw upon 30 semi-structured in-depth interviews undertaken between 2016 and 2018 to explore the interplay between material, creative and symbolic forms of fashion production in the city. Interview material is supported by the analysis of data collected from the Office for National Statistics and the Higher Education Statistics Agency. London’s fashion ecosystem is seen as having strong focus on creativity, artistic values and forms of symbolism, which are however regarded as in tension with a viable fashion design industry, an effective business culture and manufacturing system. The paper contributes to the literature on the fashion’s positioning in urban economies by shedding light on the interaction between production, creative and symbolic elements in a global creative city.
... In 2009 the sociologist and fashion theorist Agnès Rocamora, drawing on both Bourdieu and Foucault, developed the notion of a 'fashion discourse'. Rocamora explores the complex formation of texts, statements, and ideas articulated in the French fashion media to demonstrate how and where fashion discourses proliferate, and the social and material practices that give them life and meaning (Rocamora, 2009). Fashion discourse is critical to the maintenance of the fashion system, through which fashion also 'constructs dominant narratives about health, gender, sexuality, class and race, or at least, fashion colludes with dominant narratives in any given social framework' (2016, Tynan: 186). ...
This chapter discusses approaches to expanded fashion practices. The central focus here is not making garments, but a post-productivist stance, with implications in relation to the production of fashion and its associated meaning. There is an attempt to see fashion beyond its commercial limitations and instead use fashion film to speculate on our bodies as well as how we perform our materials, clothing, and wardrobes to materialise and dematerialise ourselves. This chapter carefully negotiates film as a useful critical tool, building on fashion’s own ability for image-making, where fashion collides with dominant narratives. Power is enacted symbolically through bodies via a language of signs that non-verbally convey meanings about individuals; such fashion discourses can be diverted to critically address fashion itself as a system. This exploratory chapter surveys some of the objects, ideas and approaches my practice-as-research into material and immaterial fashion through the semiotics of fashion.
Keywords: fashion film, expanded fashion practice, post-productivist, materiality, dematerialised practices, fashion discourse, semiotics of fashion, performing material performing wardrobes, practice-as-research.
... In the cities that tend more towards symbolic production (Paris and London), there is a relative absence of a deep manufacturing base, with design more disconnected from the material production of clothes, particularly beyond specialist elite or experimental fashions. Just as important as the contemporary practice of design is the long-running importance that these cities hold in global fashion imaginaries (Rocamora, 2009). The central position of Paris in fashion is associated with the emergence of haute couture in the mid-nineteenth century, and then the ways that the symbolic associations between the city and cultural production effectively created a form of monopoly rent. ...
In recent years, local governments and academic researchers have drawn increasing attention to the idea of the fashion city as a strategic factor for urban economic growth. In addition to renowned fashion capitals, second‐tier cities of fashion have proliferated, giving rise to a large heterogeneity of centres of production, design, consumption and culture. Despite its rising popularity, however, the concept of the fashion city is still weakly codified, and only simplistic tool‐kit strategies have been adopted to transform cities into contemporary fashion hubs. Drawing upon Weber's ideal‐type approach, this intervention develops an analytical framework for thinking about the diverse nature of fashion's relation with cities. The search for the elusive singular fashion city is replaced by three ideal types—the ‘manufacturing fashion city’, the ‘design fashion city’ and the ‘symbolic fashion city’—which can be used as a heuristic device to trigger debate about the distinctive characteristics of fashion centres and speculate about future developmental pathways. The essay stimulates critical reflection on the different kinds of positioning that fashion takes in urban economies and the developmental pathways of different forms of fashion city formations.
... The promotional narratives involved in constructing place as a form of innovative urbanism also attempt to highlight the value of one promised location above another to justify the notion of a unique "must-visit" experience. Similarly, certain oligarchic fashion capitals are privileged and considered as being more influential by fashion commentators and media (Godart 2014) with the eternal branding and recognition of cities, as when equating Paris as premier fashionable hub (Rocamora 2009). The content of topographical narratives premised on the geographic location of modern global cities, as with Hong Kong, often tap into imagined geographies of exoticism, orientalism, of fashioned place located in the binary between the centralised modernist West versus the marginalised, traditionalist East. ...
The relationship between fashion and the city is founded on symbiotic assumptions representing and symbolising modernity in constructing and exploring urban identity. Manifestations of this situation are apparent in the way that fashion is played out globally in city spaces and places through an endless cycle of creation, dissolution and recreation of experiential retail space in new forms of urbanism. This dynamic process also operates on micro and macro levels, as clothing envelops the body in its material layering in the same way that urban buildings contain bodies within their frame. Both fashion and architectural spaces negotiate boundaries between public and private spaces while delineating identities in their broader societal locations. Consequently, this paper examines fashion retail through the lens of constructing and engaging with the consumer experience within a particular Hong Kong neighbourhood recently gentrified and rebranded. A case study approach is adopted featuring a grounded analysis of a selected retail zone in Hong Kong’s Star, Sun and Moon Street precinct. The analysis is based on interpretive interviews with situated retailers examining how constructed spaces are imagined and experienced when facilitating experiential value. This occurs in the combined process of place-making and selling fashion from physical, material, aesthetic, symbolic and perceptual angles and by employing sensory, experiential cues to generate participation and proximity. It further questions the generic effectiveness of sensory, experiential drivers in locating and engaging the beneficiaries of infrastructural and cultural imaginaries for fashion-based retail.
... give them life and meaning (Rocamora, 2009). It is clear that fashion discourse is critical to the maintenance of the fashion system, through which fashion also 'constructs dominant narratives about health, gender, sexuality, class and race, or at least, fashion colludes with dominant narratives in any given social framework' (2016, Tynan:186). ...
Abstract
Going against the traditional productivist nature of fashion design, this practice-based PhD proposes a strategy for critical fashion practices in a research context at the intersection of fashion, fine arts, and film methodologies. This interdisciplinary strategy investigates fashion in the expanded field, exploring fashion practice as a form of critical thinking, questioning the fashion system itself: a practice of unmaking. The purpose of this research is to develop a practice-based method of producing an essay film as an artistic reflection critically discussing the problems of the fashion system, providing new insights into the way a fashion designer develops new approaches that can expand the action spaces available for fashion. Since the etymology of the word ‘fashion’ relates it to the Latin factio, meaning ‘making’ or ‘doing,’ to ‘unmake’ fashion carries in itself a paradox: it is both a metaphorical undoing and a methodological one, a practice of fashion resistance by not producing clothing, a deconstruction of fashion in order to understand what its made of – like unpicking the seams of a jacket in order to analyse its construction. It de-constructs underlying assumptions regarding a transition to post-productivism, exposing the limitations of current market-driven fashion design processes. Drawing on Rosalind Krauss’s notion of sculpture in the expanded field (1979), as used in the discourse on cinema (Bardon et al., 2015), this research documents the development of experimental fashion films since the 1980s and the interdisciplinary fashion practices that stand at the edge of the fashion discipline. It investigates how thought experiments can steer the creative process towards a critique of fashion, drawing from modernist conceptual and de-materialized art practices towards the development of a conceptual fashion. The research methodology developed within the practice extends the potential of communicating through the essay film format in order to critique fashion within the contemporary context of heightened concerns about climate change and environmental issues induced by mass-production, fast-fashion, and global fashion distribution and consumption. This is developed through a juxtaposition of allegorical images resembling a thought process: the fashion image is used as a thinking-form for constructing a critique of its own systems. The thesis emphasizes the importance of taking a critical stance to fashion due to the lack of reflection within current fashion practices, synthesizing a body of knowledge to inform practitioners of experimental, critical fashion while revealing complexities within the communication of these concerns, proposing fashion as the representation of a deconstructive thought where dress itself becomes ‘immaterial’.
... One of the most compelling concepts that Foucault developed was discourse, 3 which describes how knowledge is created and organized. Agnès Rocamora draws on both Bourdieu and Foucault to develop the notion of a 'fashion discourse': she explores the complex formation of texts, statements and ideas on Paris articulated in the French fashion media to demonstrate how and where fashion discourses proliferate and the social and material practices that give them life and meaning (Rocamora, 2009). It is clear that fashion discourse is critical to the maintenance of the fashion system, but fashion also constructs dominant narratives about health, gender, sexuality, class and race. ...
In this chapter, I examine the practices and discourses of fashion through the work of the philosopher Michel Foucault. His concern with the body as site of social control has inspired theorists from a range of academic disciplines to apply his ideas to the social practices linked to fashion, beauty, style and regulation clothing. The growth of academic interest in Foucault’s work has reflected shifts in thinking about structures of power, moving away from an analysis of political leadership, to focus instead on the disciplines and practices of everyday life. This chapter considers how power structures work through the embodied practices of fashion and dress.
... As with marketing tuned in to local celebrities, commodities and services adjust for local cultural aspects-including religious cultures. 1 This requires an escalation of fashion industry, media, and marketing discourse already well established about geographical and cultural taste distinction as national or regional or even city-specific (Rocamora 2009;Breward and Gilbert 2006). In relation to the construction of a Muslim fashion market, fashion professionals may require skills in navigating processes of orientalizing and self-orientalizing previously utilized in the marketing of Asian designers in the West (Kondo 1997) and the navigation of by Western brands of Asian markets (Mazzarella 2003). ...
Discrimination and exclusion because of body size and race is endemic in the globalized fashion industry and its media, despite that consumer activism on both fronts has led to some progress in market offer, industry practice, and regimes of representation. That both size and race inequities are present in the Muslim modest fashion industry and media is not surprising; the niche modest fashion industry cross-faith will inevitably reproduce some components of wider societal division and tension. Distinctive is how these often intersecting forms of discrimination are experienced and judged in a fashion industry and media focused on serving—and creating—a multi-ethnic and supra-national consumer demographic defined by Muslim religious identity and cultures. The challenges of fostering size and racial inclusivity demonstrate the extent to which normative modesty ideals are predicated on bodies that are non-“fat” and often non-black. The ways in which large and/or racialized bodies are judged to have failed in achieving preferred versions of modest embodiment reveal wider fault-lines in the affective affiliation to the umma, the imagined global community of Muslim believers. © 2019
... Simmel 1905;Blumer 1969) have been replaced by beliefs that fashion emanates from many sources and diffuses in various ways (Crane and Bovone 2006;Godart 2009). From this perspective, a new meaning for fashion is produced by the collective activities of various agents and institutions (Rocamora 2009). In addition, an important aspect of a systems perspective in fashion is not only the significance of the multiple actors involved but also the significance of the activities among these actors. ...
This article challenges traditional ways of understanding fashion as a social phenomenon. By considering the everyday social practice of fashion where looking, wearing, choosing, discarding, consuming, and producing fashion have central roles in understanding fashion’s person–object relationships, this study advances an alternative ontological view of fashion as a volatile emotional condition and inconstant state of mind. This suggested shift in theoretical perspective is significant in understanding and stimulating change or maintaining stability in fashion phenomena and could have principal consequences for thinking and developing policy in relation to fashion as well as to more general issues in person–object conditioned design cultures. © 2018
... This, in fact, is the American 'musical' at its worst; not even the presence of Mr. Fred Astaire, who was in the original stage production, nor that of Miss Audrey Hepburn can save the day." 2 The surviving musical numbers are "Funny Face," "He Loves and She Loves," "S'Wonderful," and "Let's Kiss and Make Up." 3Gaines (1990: 195) relates, for instance, how Alfred Hitchcock insisted costume should play a subservient role in the narrative structure of his films and how George Cukor commented that if the costume, "knocked your eye out, it was neither good for a particular scene, nor the entire film." 4 SeeThompson (1995), for instance, on the symbiotic relationship between the development of modern society and the mass media, and the ways the latter have led institutions to mediatize communications and products with individuals and audiences. 5Rocamora (2009) andTynan (2016) have also demonstrated the relevance of his ideas to how fashion and clothing function as discourse. Rocamora merges theoretical standpoints by Foucault and Bourdieu to analyze how a "fashion media discourse" has operated to articulate French style as Paris style, while Tynan analyzes his ideas about a disciplinary regime in regard to dress and the body.6 ...
In this paper I mobilize Funny Face (dir. Stanley Donen, 1956) to examine the intertextual nexus between fashion, fashion photography, and film. Set in New York City and Paris, with costume design by Hubert de Givenchy and Edith Head, the film is a latter day telling of the Pygmalion myth, such that photographer Dick Avery (Fred Astaire) and Maggie Prescott (Kay Thompson), the dictatorial Fashion Editor of Quality, take up the challenge of converting Jo Stockton (Audrey Hepburn), whom they regard as an unprepossessing bookstore intellectual, into a top model. Thus I analyze how a film that is more generally regarded as a benchmark in the Hollywood musical for its exuberant use of colour and songs is, more particularly, a cinematic locus for both the mediation and mediatization of fashionable identities. To this end, I assess how the film elaborates the power of the fashion industry as a matter of social practice in regards to Foucauldian discourse and the related concept of the énoncé, or event/ statement. Thus I evince I two events/statements-"Think Pink!" and "Bonjour Paris"-to discuss in particular the relationship of style to national identities and the need or desire for America to assert cultural leadership in fashion photography, art, and design over France in the context of 1950s Cold War politics. By comparison, I enlist the statements, "Take the Picture!" and "A Bird of Paradise," to examine respectively the dynamic of looking/gazing between the fashion photographer and designer and their (in this case) female models, the nexus between star designing, clothing, and gender identity, and what Foucault calls assujetissement-subjection-which connotes the dual process of Jo's subordination as well as the act of her becoming or "being made" a subject according to a system of power.
This article examines Elegancias, a Paris-based fashion magazine published between 1911 and 1914, as a vehicle for the transmission of legitimate taste and cultural capital to Latin American elites. Through a historiographical approach grounded in Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of distinction, it analyzes how the magazine offered rationalized models of bourgeois refinement through fashion journalism, social chronicles, and advertising. Rather than simply reflecting trends, Elegancias functioned as a pedagogical tool that mediated access to the codes of French haute couture, enabling Latin American readers to participate in the symbolic struggle for distinction and to disassociate themselves from stigmatized figures such as the rastaquouère. By foregrounding the intersections of consumption, symbolic power, and transatlantic cultural exchange, the study reveals how Elegancias operated as an informal yet influential mechanism within the cultural field of early twentieth-century fashion.
What would it mean to invite disability into dialogue? Disability in Dialogue attunes us to the dialogues of and about disability. In the pages of this book, we ask readers to consider the dialogic constitution of disability and to imagine its reformulation. We find the voices, bodies, social norms, visceral experiences, discourses, and acts of resistance that materialize disability in all its dialogic and enfleshed complexity: tensions, contradictions, provocations, frustrations and desires. This volume makes a unique contribution, bringing together authors from disciplines as diverse as communication, dialogue studies, psychology, sociology, design, rhetoric and activism. Because we take dialogue seriously, this book is designed to be brave as we examine the ways of being in the world that dialogic practices engender and allow, as well as beckon to continue. By way of a variety of frameworks, such as discourse analysis, dialogue studies, narrative analysis, and critical approaches to discourse, the chapters of this book take us through a polylogue of and about disability, demanding that we consider our own roles in bringing forth disabled ways of being and how we might, instead, choose ways that enable our common existence.
What happens when politics enters strongly aesthetic cultural fields? This article proposes a novel conceptual framework, which we propose to call ideologization, to understand how political-ideological considerations influence cultural legitimation. We build on theories of legitimation and cultural intermediaries to examine the strategic case of fashion as a cultural production field at the intersection of aesthetics and economics. Combining an analysis of frames in fashion magazines since the 1980s with critical discourse analysis of British Vogue in turning-point year 2020, we theorize ideologization as consisting of three elements: aesthetic agenda-setting; the reimagination of relations between producers, consumers and intermediaries; and the generation of discursive contradictions. This process of ideologization, which we see across cultural fields since the late 2010s, has strong implications for intermediaries who act as framers and brokers of legitimate culture. We conclude by proposing future research to further develop the ideologization framework and detail the long-term impact of political-ideological logics on cultural fields.
Journal of Romanian Studies
This paper explores the contrasts between the draconic taxation policies affecting garment production, dissemination, and intake in 1930s Romania and the concurrent glamour displayed by fashion-consuming women in public spaces in Bucharest. The focus is on the relationship between the Romanian state and the idea of fashionability represented by the flâneuses promenading Calea Victoriei. This paper employs visual and written text analysis to determine the commonalities in messaging and language used in the literature related to women's fashion in interwar Bucharest. The sources range from fiction and non-fiction interwar books, illustrated and glossy periodicals, photographs, and postcards from the author's personal collection. This research is built on the interdisciplinary model of fashion studies, borrowing methods from semiotics, cultural, fashion, and Romanian studies. Through the lens of fashion, the aim is to decode the negotiations between state authority agendas and women's wish for prosperity and modernity.
This article examines descriptions of women and airplanes in the pages of American and French interwar fashion magazines. Samples from Femina, La Gazette du Bon Ton, Harper’s Bazaar, Ladies Home Journal, Vogue (American and Paris editions), and Women’s Wear Daily illustrate how the relationship between women and transportation technology evolved to promote messages of female independence, illustrated by aviatrix ensembles from Madeleine Vionnet and Elsa Schiaparelli. These designs and representations of them in transatlantic media fused the body with the machine, presenting what Jessica Burstein describes as “cold modernism.” But these same publications also played on an imperialist sense of superiority, trafficking in racial slurs and cultural bigotry, a preponderant phenomenon described by Anne McClintock in her book Imperial Leather. Ultimately, the spectacularization of aviation and style in fashion media exposed borders that represented either freedom or confinement for women: borders between the nimble body and the clothing that restricted it, between sedentary flesh and flying machine, between the stationary present and the fast-moving future, between the familiar “I” and the unknown other. This article uncovers those technological thresholds and the fashionable women who dared to cross them.
The adoption by local governments of neoliberal theories and strategic planning, which promotes the use of competitiveness scales and business marketing criteria in urban management, generated a series of changes in cities with the aim of reversing the closure of factories and shops and attracting new businesses, residents and tourists. In this context, the cinema became a media platform to project the image that wanted to promote of the city as a tourist destination and an innovative and creative scene, mainly through the action of the Film Commissions. This article analyses the relationship between cinema and the city of Porto, from the first film episodes to the co-financing by the local Film Commission of the film Porto, by Brazilian-born filmmaker Gabe Klinger. The study contrasts the way in which local director Manoel de Oliveira projected the city of Porto in his works, with the objective and qualitative analysis of Gabe Klinger’s film. Among the conclusions, we can mention how the cinema shows over time the functional changes of the modern city and that the projected image must have a clear relationship with the sense of place of the filmed city.
The invisibility of stylists is not specific to countries where fashion may be an emerging industry. Unlike other fashion participants such as photographers and models, many capable international stylists have remained unknown and underrated (Beard 2013). Very few scholars have contributed to the subject of fashion styling. While researchers have analyzed economic facets of editorial styling (Lynge Jorlen 2016), or the freelance labor of celebrity stylists (Lifter 2018), little attention has been paid to the examination of other practices conducted by fashion stylists in print or the social media.
The purpose of this research is to identify the different factors that lead to overlooking the role of Iranian fashion stylists and the ways in which they negotiate regulations. The Islamic Republic’s rules on hijab apply to any visual medium through which stylists attempt to represent their job. This research contributes to key concepts of fashion studies on social and cultural scales. It refers to the documented work of scholars and researchers on definitions of fashion styling, its framework, the utilization of styling in fashion editorials and advertising campaigns in fashion magazines and digitorials on social media, specifically Instagram. A combination of qualitative methods is employed to examine the absence of styling in Iranian fashion magazines from a micro-interaction-ism perspective. I use the empirical approach by interviewing Iranian fashion stylists and their collaborators such as editors. My primary sources for image analysis include Iranian, Middle Eastern, and a few American magazines that featured hijab editorials.
Shanghai has become an economic center of China and the world, as well as a place where young urbanites connect the dots between its mythical past and its promising future. A city of influence with a growing art scene, striving creative industries, and millions of avid tech-savvy consumers, Shanghai is also a fashion capital in the making. The Gen Z, or digital natives born after the mid-1990s, are at the forefront of social, economic, and cultural transformations. Their behaviors, aspirations, and mobile identities are increasingly driving the worlds of fashion and luxury, in China and globally. This chapter examines Shanghai fashion through three dimensions: the physical, digital, and social dimensions. The fusion of physical and virtual places in a phygital world, and soon in the metaverse, combine with the fast-moving sociocultural environment of an emerging country to create opportunities and challenges for the fashion industry.KeywordsChinaShanghaiCreative and cultural industriesFashionGen ZIdentityTechnology
Although technology has long been integral to the fashion system, executives from both Uniqlo and Allbirds are placing a renewed emphasis on it. In press interviews, company leaders argued that the clothing and shoemaker, respectively, are not fashion brands, but “technology” firms and their true competitors are the likes of Apple. Understanding that both fashion and branding are created from public discourse, this paper takes a critical discourse approach to the statements by executives, their related press coverage and their brand messaging. The paper argues that such statements discursively set the brands’ products outside of the fashion system and create their own sense of temporality. However, such statements play into contemporary discourse structures that prioritize technology as a “serious” endeavor, while concurrently degrading the associations with fashion and personal appearance. Moreover, this paper suggests that the use of framing within fashion discourses might be a productive future research endeavor.
This doctoral thesis investigates how the field of fashion design is affected by the current transformations in technological environments of “fashion 4.0”. Contributing to fashion studies and design research, the theoretical framework of this qualitative research draws from authorship theorisation, sociology of professions and posthumanism. The empirical multiple-case study research focuses on four pioneering, technologically advanced “fashion 4.0” fashion design practices, where the creation happens in virtual spaces and is shared with non-professionals, networks or machines. The case studies are The Fabricant, Atacac, Self-Assembly and Minuju. The primary data were collected ethnographically through semi-structured interviews and field observation and complemented by written or spoken material generated by the cases. The secondary data consisted of media publications on the cases. Research material is analysed using the reflexive thematic analysis method.
The article-based thesis consists of four publications and an introduction. Publication I, “From Worth to Algorithms: The Role and Dimensions of Authorship in the Field(s) of Fashion Design”, is a conceptual investigation of fashion designers’ authorship in relation to their profession and contemporary digital practices. Publication II, “Open-Source Philosophy in Fashion Design: Contesting Authorship Conventions and Professionalism”, delves into open-source philosophy as a design approach that contests conventional fashion designership, analysing the phenomenon through three empirical case studies. Publication III, “Digital 3D Fashion Designers: Cases of Atacac and The Fabricant”, looks closely at two case studies that represent the rise of digital(-only) fashion and liquify the boundaries of fashion designership. Publication IV “Just Hit a Button!’ – Fashion 4.0 Designers as Cyborgs, Experimenting and Designing with Generative Algorithms” explores algorithmic fashion design as a posthuman dimension of designership and proposes the concept of a cyborg designer.
The thesis provides new knowledge on the authorship and professionalism of “fashion 4.0 designers” operating in the digitalised society. It is argued that the new (sub)field of digital fashion contributes to the re-professionalisation of fashion design through open-source philosophy, posthuman discourse, intellectualisation of fashion practice, novel employment possibilities and entry to the gaming and technology fields. Fashion 4.0 practices are changing the ideals of fashion design from the autonomous designer to a community player and metathinker who adjusts their skills according to projects, collaborators and co-creators. The fleshiness of fashion design transpires in digital fashion practices in which designers use digital technologies as design companions, ledgers of their tacit knowledge, sites and materials of creation. Fashion 4.0 designers are characterised by fluidity between digital technologies, human networks and physical realities.
There are few sartorial ensembles as heavily signified as masculine as a suit. This article focuses on the suit within queer fashion digital cultures and spaces to explore how butch of colour digital fashion suits up to offer us different ways to think about masculinity. Intervening in the erasure of women of colour in histories of fashion – including menswear – and histories of sexuality – butch, dapper, tomboy, dandy – I argue that butch digital fashion works as a site and composition of flesh, fabric and feeling that reworks masculinity as a project of embodiment. I look at three interwoven dimensions of butch digital fashion – aesthetic process, texture as feeling and spatial imaginations – attending to the themes of fantasy, desire and pleasure. I situate butch within and between fashion studies and media studies to offer butch as a relation, practice, orientation and site of embodiment to think about being and becoming, about the body politics of space and feeling, as matters of race, sexuality, class and gender – and the materialities of race, sexuality, class and gender, mediated by the global, and as the global by the digital. Digital butch fashion is, at once, a visual culture, a creative visual space, a resource of queer fantasy and an aesthetic process. It is messy, tense and fraught with the politics of race, colonialism and class, yet at the same time, dense with possibility, pleasure and eroticism. Butch of colour fashion offers frames and forms for rethinking and remaking masculinity as a sign of a body, as a category of personhood, as a set of practices and feelings made coherent by processes of embodiment.
Migration is associated with the search for a more permissive environment. By linking Paris as a place of attachment, the author sees that Paris in this case can be indicated as the “home” for Indonesian gays. The feeling of “full gay” is a feeling that they never get when they stay in Indonesia. That is why many Indonesian gays decide to move out of Indonesia in any way regardless of the difficulties they face in the destination country. This paper answer two questions: what do we understand by “Gay-friendly city”? And if we talk about Jakarta, “can Jakarta be categorized as a gay-friendly city”? The author interviewed eight Indonesian gays directly in Paris with the naturalistic paradigm and analyzed with the qualitative research, and what will be found in this paper is the narrative of the eight informants. It can be said that the Indonesian gays who have migrated to Paris do not feel that their lives have been wasted. They do diaspora by going to gay bars and participating in gay pride parades. What they feel is a feeling of freedom to be able to channel their gender and sexual expression, and they found that Paris as a gay-friendly city is a kind of space of resistance.
The article analyzes the reviews of female and male fashion collections published in the “Style” supplement of the “Kommersant” newspaper during the year 2009. The “Kommersant”, the leading quality publication in Russia in the 2000s, positioned itself as a media for the financial, political and cultural elite of the country, and thus presented a case extremely interesting for discourse analysis. Namely, the world financial crisis of 2008 turned out to be a threat situation to the status quo of the elites of the moment. The situation required articulation of the belonging to the group (elite), more intense than before the crisis. I examined how the system of status markers – the discursive “semiotics of distinction” proposed to the target audience as a strategy for group identification – was constructed in the “Kommersant. Style”: the “consumption of restraint” as a metaphor for “resilience” in the face of the crisis becomes the leading recommendation of the discourse. Putting the results into the context of the 2010s, it can be realized that the idea of “restraint” in consumer behavior transcends the elitist discourse and is popularized in the field of mainstream publications.
The childlike character of ideal femininity has long been critiqued by feminists, from Mary Wollstonecraft to Simone de Beauvoir. Yet, women continue to be represented as childlike in the western fashion media, despite the historical connotations of inferiority. This book questions why such images still hold appeal to contemporary women, after three, or even four, waves of feminism.
Focusing on the period of 1990–2015, Picturing the Woman-Child traces the evolution of childlike femininity in British fashion magazines, including Vogue, i-D and Lula, Girl of my Dreams. These images draw upon a network of references, from Kinderwhore and Lolita to Alice in Wonderland and the femme-enfant of Surrealism.
Alongside analysis of fashion photography, the book presents the findings of original research into audience reception. Inviting contemporary women to comment on images of the 'woman-child' provides an insight into the meaning of this figure as well as an evaluation of theory on the 'female gaze'. Both scholarly and accessible, the book paves the way for future studies on how readers make sense of fashion imagery.
As an approach for redefining relations between text and its meaning, the idea of deconstruction appeared in the works of philosopher Jacques Derrida. This philosophical concept received the reflection in the modern architecture: it provokes a denial of stereotypes about the building's forms and functions, a conflict of the architectural elements' dislocation. Some fashion designers use a deconstruction method to destroy fashion standards and fashion stereotypes. Particularly, Belgian designer Martin Margiela questions the traditional understanding of fashion and fashion beauty and rethinks the relations between fashion forms, functions, and ideology constructed by clothing. This paper provides an analysis of the deconstructionist fashion techniques in the case of Maison Margiela fashion house. By performing the conflicting nature of fashion garments, Margiela constructs the concept of universal, basic clothes but, at the same time, very anonymous, free of labels, tags, and social judgments. This fashion of deconstruction articulates today the next level of relationship between consumers and fashion garments that is not only about standardized functions but expanded values and interpretations.
This article traces the origins of the mannequin and challenges the gender assumptions it has been cloaked in. In nineteenth-century Paris, the fashion mannequin became a key technology in the construction of normative bodies, a principal “actor” in shaping current clothing cultures, and literally embodied debates over creativity and commodification. It locates the origins of the mannequin and the advent of live male fashion models in the bespoke tailoring practices of the 1820s, several decades before the female fashion model appeared on the scene. It ties the mannequin to larger shifts in the mass-production, standardization, and literal dehumanization of clothing production and consumption. As male tailors were put out of business by the proliferation of mass-produced clothing in standardized sizes, innovators like Alexis Lavigne and his daughter Alice Guerre-Lavigne made, marketed, and mass-produced feminized mannequins and taught tailoring techniques to and for a new generation of women. Starting in the 1870s and 80s, seamstresses used these new workshop tools to construct and drape innovative garments. Despite the vilification of the mannequin as a cipher for the superficiality and lack of individuality of fashionable displays in the modern urban landscape, early twentieth-century couturières like Callot Soeurs and Madeleine Vionnet ultimately used mannequins to produce genuinely creative clothing that freed the elite female body and allowed it new forms of mobility.
This article builds on existing theories of self-presentation and self-identity through a study into the behaviour of fashion influencers who position themselves as Scottish on Instagram. Fourteen interviews were carried out with Scottish fashion influencers who were asked to reflect on their online identity. The interaction between the offline and online self is explored, where national identity and a sense of place are recognized as important attributes of self-identity in an offline setting and participants were sampled on the basis that they were projecting this as a key component of their online self. All were found to be seeking to convey an ideal identity on Instagram; this involved curating particular aspects of their offline style and showcasing these online. The issue of authenticity was complex, and a spectrum of identity evolution on Instagram is observed and reflected on. The most career-minded participants tended to portray themselves in a more one-sided manner and were most strongly influenced by a sense of their audience. In contrast, the participants who were less career-minded tended to explore more freely with their online self and were influenced most strongly by internal factors.
The construction of the Eiffel Tower for the 1889 Universal Exposition sparked “Eiffelomania,” a craze for objects imprinted with the likeness of the tower. This mania reverberated in the fashion world, with journals touting the latest fabrics, colors, and styles named “Eiffel.” But the tower's association with fashion went beyond the materiality of clothing. Careful examination of news reports and fashion chronicles from the fin de siècle period reveals that the tower was frequently cast in sartorial terms. In describing the tower's manner of “dressing,” its “clothing” and “outfits,” these discourses brought to the fore the shared theoretical bonds between fashion and architecture. This article traces the reception of the Eiffel Tower in fin de siècle Paris and argues that the sartorial imagery associated with the tower conceptualizes architecture as a form of fashion.
La construction de la Tour Eiffel à l'occasion de l'Exposition universelle de 1889 a déclenché l' « Eiffelomanie », un engouement pour toute une série d'objets réalisés à l'effigie de la Tour Eiffel. Cette obsession a eu des échos jusque dans le monde de la mode grâce aux journaux de mode qui promouvaient des étoffes, des couleurs, et des styles à la « Eiffel ». Mais l'association de la Tour Eiffel et de la mode ne s'est pas limitée à la matérialité des vêtements. Une analyse attentive des chroniques de mode démontre que la Tour Eiffel était souvent évoquée à travers des termes empruntés au lexique vestimentaire. En décrivant « l'habillement » de la Tour Eiffel, ses « robes » ou ses « toilettes », ces discours mettaient en évidence les liens théoriques que partagaient la mode et l'architecture. Cet article s'intéresse à la réception que la Tour Eiffel a eue dans le Paris fin-de-siècle, et soutient l'idée selon laquelle le champ lexical vestimentaire associé à la Tour Eiffel conceptualisait l'architecture comme une forme de la mode.
Précis
Le lien entre mode et grands magasins reste encore un chantier inexploré dans l'historiographie de la distribution. L'histoire des Galeries Lafayette montre que les fonctions du grand magasin ne peuvent se résumer à acheter et vendre des marchandises. La distribution n'est pas à la périphérie, elle est plus que le chaînon manquant entre le producteur et le consommateur, elle est au cœur de la création de mode. A partir des archives inédites de la société, cet article analyse le « Festival de la création française », une manifestation organisée en 1954 par les Galeries Lafayette pour mettre en relation créateurs et fabricants et favoriser l'émergence d'une « esthétique industrielle » en France. Cette période constitue un tournant dans l'histoire de la mode comme dans celle du grand magasin. Confrontées à la modernisation de l'industrie du vêtement en France et à l'émergence d'alternatives en matière d'approvisionnements, y compris à l'étranger, les Galeries Lafayette ont démantelé leur structure de production intégrée et se sont engagées dans un nouveau mode de production et de nouvelles relations avec leurs fournisseurs. L'analyse des dispositifs impliqués dans et autour du festival met en évidence le rôle de la marque en tant qu'intermédiaire essentiel au cœur du système de la mode.
The link between fashion and the department store remains an underexplored field in retail historiography. The history of Galeries Lafayette reveals that the department store did much more than just buy and sell. Using the company's private archives, this article examines the 1954 “Festival de la Création Française,” an event the Galeries organized to connect creators and manufacturers and to encourage the emergence of an “industrial style.” The 1950s were a pivotal moment in fashion history and for the firm. Confronted with the modernization of the apparel industry in France and the emergence of sourcing alternatives, including some from abroad, the firm dismantled its vertically integrated production structure and committed to a new mode of production and new relations with its suppliers. The analysis of the plans, activities, and objectives of the festival highlights the role of the brand as an essential intermediary at the heart of the fashion system.
This paper contributes to a theoretical discussion of fashion studies by using the framework of creative industries to analyze the Chinese fashion system. First, the paper relates the robust theoretical discussion about the term fashion system. Next, the paper considers how the concept of fashion system has been interwoven with the creative industries policies in China. The paper thus provides an empirical case on fashion diversity by describing how Chinese top-down governmental allocation and acceleration policies has uniquely created a new pathway to construct the fashion system in China.
This article argues that Paris became the capital of fashion for several reasons: (a) its cultural and social secular background that evolved between the Age of Colbert and Dior’s “New Look”; (b) the implementation of complementary business and labor structures between the end of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth century; (c) its involvement in early global exchanges of techniques, styles, media, ideas, and people. Parisian status in the fashion industry was facilitated by the crucial contribution of foreign seamstresses and designers, and the transfer and hybridization of styles, consumption habits, and industrial techniques the city collected, transformed into fashions, and sent back to the world. In other words, Paris was a hub of the international circulation of intelligence, commerce and immigration. “Paris, Capital of Fashion,” therefore, is not uniquely a part of French, or even European, history, it is a global history. Thus, the article wishes to contribute to a new history of fashion.
In the face of widespread damage and disruptive government regulation, London fashion was presented with an opportunity to redefine and reinvent itself in the aftermath of the Second World War. This paper explores how the impacts of the conflict fused with broader changes in manufacturing and promotion to force structural changes in London’s fashion industry in the late 1940s that resulted in the city developing a reputation as a center of design rather than production. Indications of this shift from production to design can be seen particularly clearly in the rising cultural capital of the London “brand” in mid-market ready-to-wear fashions for women. By focusing on this sector of the industry, this paper adds a new perspective to previous studies of postwar fashion by looking beyond the activities of a narrow band of high-end fashion houses. From the geographies of manufacturing to the symbolic use of London postcodes on garment labels, it compiles a comprehensive impression of the significant role played by London’s mid-market fashion manufacturers in managing the fashionable reputation of the city at a time when its industry faced catastrophic decline and reflects on how this shaped London’s development as a fashion city in subsequent decades.
From minimalist installation to monumental set design, runway scenography is now central to the grammar of fashion communications. Often used to symbolize the power of the brand or to reaffirm its DNA, the strategic choices of setting, space, and set design are an integral part of the promotion of designer fashion. Today’s runway show does not simply present a collection of clothes against a background set design; it uses scenography more instrumentally as the setting for brands and digital influencers to capture images of fashion for followers of online social media. Architectural paradigms now feed into the symbolic discourse of branded fashion and influence the way in which collections are spectacularized for different audiences. This article analyses the strategic use of runway scenography as a key part of contemporary branded communications, exploring specifically how the creative synergies between fashion and architecture are being reshaped by the impact of digital social media, in particular by Instagram.
When the animate fashion model emerged in the 1870s, cultural observers were quick to note the many paradoxes the ‘mannequin vivant’ embodied. Occupying both private and public spaces and blurring the ontological divide between the original and copy, the living fashion model questioned the boundaries between corporeality and mechanical reproduction. This essay explores the liminal position of the ‘mannequin vivant’ by situating it within another paradoxical relationship the model engendered, that of fame and anonymity. Accounts of the living fashion model during the fin de siècle period not only attest to the model’s ubiquitous media presence, but also to her anonymity. This essay proposes that the fin-de-siècle living fashion model, through its integration into the cityscape and its position in the cultural imaginary, was inextricably tied to the network of celebrity in ways that endure to this day.
While there has been significant discussion of the intertwined roles of mobility and identity, little has been written about these two factors in relation to an important third factor, dress. This paper examines dress and identity within two lifestyle migration memoirs, as forms of media such as these create socially situated imagined places where readers can explore new lives and ways of being. Using a culturally oriented framework to examine the moving parts of mobility, identity and dress within text and place, this paper engages with Carol Tulloch's theory that styling the body is self‐telling, whereby dress reveals autobiographical details about the self through clothing choices. It argues that moving from one place to another begins a process of change, and that clothes are used to signify this process to others. This paper contributes to understanding the transformative process of migration, particularly as it relates to imaginative explorations associated with texts. It also contributes to another underdeveloped field, the study of dress in rural areas. Its original application of Tulloch's theory along with broader social theories, within a discussion of lifestyle migration discourse and dress, means that it differs from previous migration research. This paper discusses lifestyle migration and resulting identity changes as demonstrated in two literary texts. The texts, as do media more generally, provide an important place for readers to imaginatively explore new identities and ways of living that cannot be uncovered in the same way through other methods.
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