Exploring Fashion as Communication: The Search for a new fashion history against the grain

ABSTRACT

This introductory essay calls for a new fashion media history informed by truly interdisciplinary scholarship, nuanced in both fashion and media studies. It reflects upon the ways in which the study of fashion as communication and fashion journalism have been addressed, arguing that fashion studies has laid out a western backbone of this history that invites and deserves to be confirmed and contested. It encourages future authors to find those fashion media discourses, voices, and practices that brought attention to fashion and dress moving past the so-called ‘fashion bibles’ to unravel discourses reaching popular audiences, underrepresented minorities, unlisted geographies, and subcultures.

KEYWORDS:

• Fashion journalism
• fashion as communication
• fashion media
• identity
• media history

More than two decades ago, Malcolm Barnard published Fashion as Communication to discuss the idea that fashion and clothes work as a way to communicate identity. His book challenged the notion of fashion as superfluous by introducing and explaining fashion and clothes as cultural phenomena, as a form of language. It explored the meanings of fashion and clothes by engaging with a wide range of theoretical traditions within media and cultural studies, arguing that there is no static, fixed, or intrinsic meaning in clothes, but, instead, that meanings are embedded in a broader cultural context. In it, Barnard proposed an understanding of fashion and clothes as ways to communicate within a culture that function as a signifying system. The book challenged the notion of identity as an expression to propose that fashioning and clothing are learned preexisting codes that, instead, construct these identities. Back then, fashion studies had not yet blossomed as an independent academic discipline. However, this did not stop scholars from embarking into what can now be considered a foundational body of scholarship for this area of study. As a consequence, the discipline has expectedly inherited a varied range of theoretical and methodological approaches brought about by those academics who pioneered the field. Among these stands Barnard’s book. It was a timely and needed contribution to analyze and problematize the conception of fashion, fashion as communication, and the many forms of communicating fashion. Fashion studies has consolidated as a self-standing academic discipline in the past decade, producing its own doctoral graduates, but it has also continued to foster great potential for interdisciplinary contributions.¹

Barnard’s seminal work was not the first to address the potential role of fashion as communication; neither was it the first one to set an interest in fashion journalism’s specificities. However, in engaging with all previous theoretical attempts to pin down fashion in this context, it managed to become a canonic text for mapping the scholarly grounds for those interested in the intersection of fashion and media studies. In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, media theorist Marshall McLuhan studied technologies as extensions of the human body. (McLuhan, 2013 [First published in 1964]). In doing so, he defined clothes as an extension of human skin, and the conformity to fashions as the creation of a social medium. (87–89, 99) A few years later, French semiotician Roland Barthes studied the meanings of fashion, and how fashion and dress translated into language; in other words, how fashion functions as signs. This exploration resulted in his – now canonic within fashion theory – book from 1967, The Fashion System (Systeme de la Mode) (Barthes, 1990b). In it, he proposed a method for understanding fashion magazines’ role in decoding fashionable dictates. (See also Barthes, 2006; Joblin, 2016). These discussions permeate contemporary scholarship. As Friedrich Welstein explains, “clothing is a vehicle of communication – regardless of the individual style or meaning or content of that communication.” (2013, p. 112) Therefore, “[a]n appropriate dress code will enable otherwise impossible courses of action and allow access to places that are not only defined by environmental conditions.” (111) Heavily theoretical explorations characterize the beginning and consolidation of a new discipline – in this case, fashion studies – and are prone to universalizing or finding abstract understandings of an object of study, namely the use of fashion as communication and the characteristics of the communication of fashion. Therefore, it is not surprising that most authors relied back on theorists like Roland Barthes to find academic legitimacy. Consequently, constant debates regarding the search for meaning and identity had led to interpretative readings of garments, particularly when addressing fashion, costume, and clothes from the aesthetic dimension of visual culture.

This special issue belongs to a series of activities launched in 2015 under the umbrella denomination “Exploring the intersections of fashion, film, and media,” with a methodological workshop at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, where I proposed to follow film studies’ “historical turn” for studying fashion (Castaldo Lundén, 2015; see also Castaldo Lundén, 2018a). This suggested moving away from the object of study – in the case of film studies this meant the study of film as a text – toward its context, its epiphenomena (Klinger, 1989, 1997). A similar rationale serves the study of fashion as embedded in a broader social, economic, and cultural matrix. This calls for a move away from semiotic interpretations and into the many cultural, social, and economic factors that directly or indirectly influence fashion as a cultural product and as an industry. A new fashion history that promotes the use of archives to understand fashion beyond visual analysis.² The study of fashion journalism is key in this endeavor. This is the third special issue showcasing interdisciplinary studies under the mentioned umbrella denomination, and the first one to focus solely on the intersections of fashion and media studies in the form of fashion journalism. As stated elsewhere, costume design represents the most evident link between fashion and film studies (Castaldo Lunden, 2018b). Likewise, the study of fashion journalism becomes a fertile ground for exploring the intersections of fashion and media studies. This initiative proposes a move into the study of discourses, but it also addresses the politics and the socio-cultural standing of the studied mediums with the potential for a new fashion media history or, at least in this case, a new history of fashion journalism. This history should not be limited to the overrepresentation of a handful of fetishized publications whose reach and readership should be emphatically questioned instead of glorified due to the allure of their mythologized standing.

The study of fashion journalism has captured the interest of scholars before this special issue, yet much work remains to be done from an academic perspective. Fashion scholars have traced the origins of fashion magazines to 1672, through a publication named Le Mercure Galant. (Bartlet, Cole, & Rocamora, 2013, p. 1) This precedent discloses more than three centuries of fashion journalism awaiting the curious scrutiny of restless historical explorers. The study of fashion journalism remains an underexplored area, often falling in the uncritical glorification of a fashion media practice fascinated with fashion itself. After all, most fashion students dream of a career within the industry, which (arguably and seemingly) requires an uncritical approach to its existing practices. As Marion Frances Wolbers assertively observes, “[o]ne of the biggest criticisms of fashion magazine journalism is that it avoids criticism. Fashion magazines are unlike any other periodical genre in that they are heavily dependent on advertisers.” (2009, p. 177) In this tradition of training well-fitted students to enter the job market, much literature in fashion journalism serves as a template to perpetuate and reproduce ongoing questionable practices. Uncovering Fashion: Fashion Communications Across the Media provides an understanding of fashion journalism as a craft. (Wolbers, 2009) This textbook is useful for training students willing to enter the profession. However, its lack of critical tools works as a template for molding future fashion columnists that will perpetuate fashion media’s problematic traditions. Similarly, in Fashion Journalism, Julie Bradford provides an introduction to the subject as a training guide for future practitioners. (Bradford, 2014) Focusing on a contemporary scenario, the author offers a panorama of the industry, describing the role of fashion media, its audiences, public relations and social media, giving concrete tips on how to interview and report.

Creating fashion media that is free from the commercial demands of its industry seems unattainable. After all, fashion media grew simultaneously with the expansion of consumer culture and the boom of the printed press (Marshall & Morreale, 2018, pp. 31–32), with a close industry liaison that blurred the lines between journalism and advertising. Brian Morean pinpoints at the double function of the fashion magazine as both cultural product and commodity. As cultural products, he argues, magazines circulate “in a cultural economy of collective meanings,” providing “how-to recipes, illustrated stories, narratives and experiential and behavioral models” for readers to reflect and act. (Morean, 2006, p. 727) Morean concludes that fashion magazines exist to teach the public “why fashion should be important in their lives, what the latest trends may be, who are the names that drive them and where the clothes themselves may be purchased.” (p. 737–738) In Fashion Media – Past and Present, the editors set to “shed light on past and current shifts in the fashion media,” interrogating “key social and cultural issues through the empirical analysis of a variety of textual platforms from different historical times and cultures.” (Bartlett, Cole, and Rocamora, 2013, p. 1) Agnès Rocamora, one of this book’s editors, may be one of the most prolific fashion scholars contributing to the study of contemporary fashion media (Mora & Rocamora, 2015; Rocamora, 2001, 2006a, 2006b, 2011, 2012, 2017, 2018a, 2018b). Her work has led to more case study-based inquiries that help map a panorama of the new media landscape, focusing predominantly on Paris’ ongoing mythical standing as a fashion capital.

The study of fashion communication is also a part of women’s studies. Fashion’s implied shallowness has historically relegated the topic to a second-place as soft news or “girl talk.” As an industry, however, fashion has historically fostered female entrepreneurship. As Marianne Van Remoortel argues, early fashion editors were highly educated and multilingual women, skills that were needed to set up the “complex series of transnational exchange practices.” (2017, p. 270) Consequently, studying fashion media from a historical perspective is also studying women’s history. The scholarly study of fashion media would benefit from the informed analysis of inter-, cross-, or transdisciplinary scholarship; one that, being less distracted by the mesmerizing allure of fashion itself, could lead to a change in fashion communication and, hopefully, a tangible difference in industrial practices.

Departing from secondary sources, Kate Nelson Best published The History of Fashion Journalism in 2018. This recount of the past century or so of Western fashion journalism is a much-needed entry point for plunging into the historical study of fashion media. It also evidences a need for new histories to debunk, problematize, or expand the many assertions and claims brought forward in this reliance on dated scholarship as a source. The challenge remains for these studies to find authors that are truly nuanced in all disciplines involved. These sorts of studies put the nature of “interdisciplinary” scholarship to the test. The scholarly study of fashion journalism demands a less celebratory perspective, one that propels a cultural shift leading those changes instead of following them once the industry has already co-opted them to adapt and survive.

Exploring the intersections of fashion and media also calls for a history of how fashion and dress have been communicated across geographies, mediums, and time. This special issue encourages future authors to find those fashion discourses and voices that brought attention to fashion and dress. Moving past the so-called “fashion bibles” encourages us to unravel discourses that reached popular audiences, underrepresented minorities, unlisted geographies, and subcultures. It is a call to move away from canonic perspectives, for a new fashion media history against the grain. Fashion studies has by now drawn a map that offers consolidated terminology, theories, and methods. It has also laid out a western backbone of this history that invites – and deserves – to be confirmed and contested. We need to move away from the study of fashion as communication to study fashion communication as a cultural, social, and economic phenomenon that can help us deepen our understanding of fashion as culture and industry.

The performance of fashionability and the politics of belonging

New histories can challenge our contemporary understanding of fashion journalism. This issue is timely in this sense. It invites the reader to reflect on fashion as communication, but, foremost, it invites us to reflect about how fashion is communicated with a critical eye. It invites scholars to enter an archeological study of unexplored geographies and times to find a way to embed these histories and cultures into dominant discourses that expand our knowledge of fashion, the communication of fashion, and the socio-cultural impact of fashion as communication.

In revisiting Fashion as Communication for this special issue, Malcolm Barnard focuses on a critical approach to media theory. He puts the sender/receiver model to the test, addressing how cultural studies and fashion journalism consistently “present fashion communication in terms of messages.” (p. 258-270) He also discusses semiological models of communication concerning fashion, delving into how Derrida’s concept of the constitutive prosthesis has been used – and can be further used – to criticize models of communication. In following this strand of deconstruction, that originally problematized the role of language in society and culture, we need to first agree upon understanding fashion as a language. In doing so, we need to follow the idea of writing as a prosthetic exteriorization of speech with its limitations. As briefly mentioned earlier, clothes had been previously conceptualized as prosthesis, as an extension of the self, in the theorizations of Marshall McLuhan. For McLuhan, however, clothes were not an addition to the self as much as an extension of the skin. In setting clothes as a medium, as a technology, McLuhan acknowledged the power of clothes to change us and, consequently, to change society and culture, particularly in following fashion trends as a way to encourage conforming participation. (See also Welstein, 2013, p. 111) Barthes would later use the skin metaphor to poetically describe language in A Lover’s Discourse (1990a, p. 73). In taking fashion as communication, based on the sender/receiver model, fashion and clothing have become the message’s channel and the message itself.

Departing from Derrida’ notion of constitutive prosthetics (2010), Barnard challenges the idea of an ontological identity communicated through fashion, arguing that all messages encoded in the use of fashion as prosthetics are preexisting and culturally determined. Subcultures are, for example, built upon the preexisting understanding of the creation of a collective, following pre-established dress codes and not resulting merely from the collective gathering of individuals’ untainted expression. In this poststructuralist criticism of fashion as communication, Barnard rests on Derrida’s notion of différance, acknowledging the subjective and unstable function of language and, consequently, of any validity of a properly functioning sender/receiver model in the use of fashion as a language or fashion as communication. He discards the interpretations of fashion and clothes made by journalists, based on the same implausibility of finding objective meaning in language and, likewise, in clothes. In his intricate philosophical problematization of fashion as communication, Barnard invites us to question and deconstruct the writings of fashion journalists and scholars moving beyond the poetics of language. This deconstruction leads to institutional critique, to dismantling structures behind the constructions of our shared understandings of these fashion signifieds.

Barnard’s text also calls for a reflection, directly addressing academic work in fashion: Are we passed making meaning? In pointing at the limitations of these interpretative approaches, he (intentionally or unintentionally) hints toward a need for expanding the object of study of fashion beyond these decoding processes. The time has come, I suggest, for studies in fashion, costume, and dress to delve, instead, into in-depth, material-based arguments from a new wave of fashion historians.

This special issue compiles six articles from researchers at different stages in their careers and coming from various disciplines. Barnard’s text does not appear as a theoretical framework for other essays but rather as a revision of his contribution to the field, opening for the importance of academic discussions around fashion and clothes more than two decades ago. Moving away from the ontology of meaning in fashion as communication, and considering the common ground of language as a learned structure, all authors in this special issue delve into studying how fashion has been communicated at different points in time and through different mediums and geographies. In connecting with Barnard, they share a common ground in the so-called construction of the individual (the I) into a collective self (the me) through the advisory – and commercial – nature of fashion journalism (Mead, 2015). These discourses enhance the construction of the me as a desired selfthat can only be achieved once entering consumer culture, whether it is through adaptation or resistance.

All authors deal with the notion of appropriateness which, indirectly, dismantles an underpinning conservative and regulatory nature of fashion journalism or, better said, it showcases the anxieties of belonging embedded in fashion discourses. The fashion industry profits of motivating a desire to be always up-to-date with what is considered appropriate. To create such demand, it is also necessary to demarcate and construct the meaning of inappropriate as menacing. However, this can also be absorbed in anti-fashion discourses constructing an the me through subcultures, or it can even be reshuffled and absorbed into new fashionable dictates. Fashion editors, reality tv experts, dress reformers, and ephemeral stars are clinging to the fleeting authoritative privilege of preaching appropriateness. They function as channels to deliver the message and, in doing so, they may become the medium.

The construction of appropriateness in fashion journalism is a modern phenomenon directly linked to consumer culture and the public sphere. More generally, discussions of the culturally determined understanding of taste and its association to class performance can be found extensively in the work of Thorstein Veblen (2007) and Pierre Bourdieu (2010). The notions of taste and tastemaking have historically been associated with fashion gatekeepers . Most of these discourses emerged along women’s entrance to the public sphere. The “liberation” of women from home confinement, and their integration into a shared public space, encountered new forms of regulation of these females on the loose, demanding clear guidelines for what was a shared understanding of an appropriate presentation of the self (Goffman, 1990). The individual woman, now coexisting into an expanded collective, required guidance, even when these discourses carried contradictions about appropriateness. Fashion magazines, newspapers, and moving images, functioned as a route maps for appropriateness. They excerpted a direct influence in the encoding inherent in the act of dressing, one that was already affected by the readers’ capacity to decode those guidelines in the first place. The notion of unstable meanings is evident. The educational nature of fashion editorials goes beyond the mere description of trends, also enumerating, for example, cosmopolitan role models. This links back to Derrida’s idea of identity as only identification. It exposes the constructed nature of individual identity and, consequently, the construction of the collective in the adaptation of foreign discourses to the local scene.

In her study of The Repository of Arts, Literature, Commerce, Manufactures, Fashions, and Politics, Jessica Barker sheds light on the construction of appropriateness in evening dress in Regency-era Britain. She pointedly argues for how fashion publications served a twofold function of informing women and manufacturers alike in what was considered acceptable wear at different times of the day. This created a social coding and a series of categories, expanding market segments within the fashion and textile industries. The emphasis on British patterns and fabrics hints toward the adaptation of local discourses worth emphasizing amid France’s global influence. The industry-centered demands of so-called fashion capitals have drawn scholarly attention as dictators of fashion trends and, consequently, discourses. In its industry dependence, canonic fashion journalism has mostly amplified these voices and contributed to the mythmaking of a fashionable being worth emulating. Even when acknowledging fashion cities as path openers, cross-cultural hybridization remains a rich and fertile ground for understanding local discourses, local cultures, and reinterpretations.

In “Peripheral Fashion Editorship,” Maria Alesina picks on cultural mediators who translated and adapted French fashion discourses to the local idiosyncrasy in which they excerpted their influence. Departing from Ulf Hannerz’s understanding of transnational cultural flow, which studies the interplay between cultural centers and peripheries, Alesina focuses on the editor’s role as a critical reviewer and gatekeeper of metropolitan fashion. The study explores the work of Sofia (Rekhnevskaia-)Mei, the editor of the Russian fashion publication Modnyi magazine during the nineteenth-century. Alesina discloses the early politics of fashion geographies by acknowledging France as an epicenter, yet problematizing and challenging simplified understandings of its influence. In doing so, she ascribes a double function to cultural mediators as reviewers of innovations for their audiences and as cultural actors filtering and scrutinizing metropolitan discourses to enter their local realm. By delving into Mei’s fashion editorials, Alesina analyzes the negotiation of global influences and local considerations, pointing at the many dichotomies present in these discourses. What made a fashionable woman in St. Petersburg was, ultimately, a local construction. Following the French dictates could help build a fashionable I, but following Mai’s dictates helped construct the me in the local fashion scene, constructing a collective uniqueness. Far from falling into a hyper-coherent structuring of identity, Alesina points at the complex dichotomies that fashion journalism brought forward; contradictions that are also present in other publications and cultural context.

Alanna McKnight points at other forms of dichotomies: the co-existence of corsets fashionability discourses vis-a-vis its detractors pointing at health risks. In her study, McKnight argues that corsets were presented both as a form of identity construction and as a way of identification in crime reporting in Toronto periodicals. In following these discourses, she exposes the manifest duality by deconstructing and contextualizing these within the interests of institutions and contemporary society. It is not the message what is questioned here, but the overall need for one. Just as McKnight’s, Arlene Oak and Julia Petrov’s study of the makeover television show What Not to Wear (WNTW) addresses how regulatory discourses of femininity dictate social judgment about women’s reputability through clothes. Their study evidences how not much has changed when it comes to fashion discourses. The cross-media range of these narratives is further unraveled in the television show spin-off books. Using this case study to delve into the makeover phenomenon and gonzo journalism, the authors shed light on the ongoing nature of fashion discourses’ tradition of approval and disapproval resting on the authoritative voice of the – often self-acclaimed – arbiters of style.

In preceding the boom of self-exposure brought along by web 2.0, reality television offered a stage for the (exploitative) exposure of the ordinary, understood here as the quotidian. However, this does not come without a regulatory demand for transforming these dissidents through, once again, appropriate dress. These shows focus on transforming the I into an acceptably constructed me that fits the collective. WNTW introduces the discussion of functionality vs. adornment that is also present as a class marker in the study of taste. In guiding these transformations, the show’s hosts break with the participants’ “sense of one’s place,” (Bourdieu, 2010, p. 473, 1989) launching them into a world from which they were excluded. In these shows, the expert figure continues as a regulatory arbiter of appropriateness in the politics of belonging. After all, following fashion dictates is nothing but the manifestation of a bourgeoning anxiety. Nowhere do these discourses of fashion as communication come across as strongly as in makeover television to justify consumption. As Barnard well observes, the construction of individual identity, in the case of subcultural transformations into mainstream acceptance, showed an already coding of a taught collective demanding conscious consumption. In the cases of the raw Is, these appear as disrupting in the eyes of these experts and their entourage.³ There is a need for standardizing, for mechanizing, for categorizing, for fitting an understanding that requires the exclusion of complexities that disrupt the normative, whatever is culturally determined as the norm. This forms a common ground for mainstream fashion journalism, using contemporary industry dictates as guidelines forming a common ground demanding rapid and unquestioned adherence to every new cycle of dictates to keep the wheels of production and consumption spinning.

The advent of the Internet carried along a – sometimes concrete and sometimes utopic – democratic hope for a plurality of voices and a celebration of individualities. Web 2.0, in particular, provided an illusion of authenticity and direct contact through social media, an interaction that is free from demands of a capitalist enterprise, allowing individuals to raise in their most authentic self-expression. Such as is the case of all new media, the unavoidable marriage of consumer culture and communication rapidly tainted cyberspace to find one more platform for lifestyle advertising that opened for a rehashed form of pecuniary emulation (Veblen, 2007, pp. 20–28). Through its seemingly democratizing potential based on followers’ demands, Instagram has provided countless opportunities for endorsement practices ranging from micro-influencers to Hollywood stars. Web 2.0 has turned into a primarily commercial outlet, perpetuating discourses of privilege and systems of commodity fetishization. Helle Kannik Haastrup analyzes actress Emilia Clark’s internet presence, showing how she unravels the constructed nature of stardom through a Cinderella–fairy-godmother transformation by the power of Dior couture; a transformation others may well explore provided access to these commodities. In following Clark’s transformation into stardom, Haastrup emphasizes the importance of context in garments’ symbolic standing. She also tackles the constructed nature of fashionability and celebrity culture, as described by Clark herself. These ideas connect with Barker’s article insofar as we can see how appropriate dress in the public sphere, whether it is eveningwear or formalwear, continues to be dictated by culturally and socially imposed dress codes.

All articles hint at questioning the nature and ultimate function of fashion journalism and fashion communication, whether they depart from the demarcation of appropriate wear as presented by Jessica Barker, powerful gatekeepers’ weight as explored by Maria Alesina, the regulation of the female body as discussed in Alanna McKnight’s article, consumer culture’s propagation through approachability as tackled by Helle Kannik Haastrup, or a convergence of these, as showcased by Arlene Oak and Julia Patrov. In its attempt to bring historical awareness into other geographies and publications, this special issue has managed to focus on more popular discourses, staying away from this narrow and niche fashion elite. However, it failed to push beyond the anglophone media circuit (with the exception of Modnyi magazine s case study). Let this observation be a call for action, the torch encouraging new research daring to pick up these research questions for a new fashion media history.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elizabeth Castaldo Lundén

Elizabeth Castaldo Lundén lectures at the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University. She received her doctoral degree in Fashion Studies from Stockholm University, an MA in Cinema Studies from the same institution, and a licentiate degree in Public Relations from Universidad Argentina de la Empresa. Her research focuses on the historical liaison between Hollywood and the fashion industry, and its cultural, social, and economic impact. Her book Fashion on the Red-Carpet: A History of the Oscars and Globalisation is forthcoming by Edinburgh University Press. She is currently working on The Fashion Newsfilm Lab in collaboration with the Media Ecology Project.

Notes

1. The initiative continued with a symposium, at Stockholm University, and a series of special issues that provided a platform for scholars to show the – already ongoing – interdisciplinary initiatives bridging these areas of study.

2. In my loose borrowing of George Mead's conceptualizations of the “I” and the “me,” I take the liberty of defining theraw Is as the fashion careless or non-encoded subjects, excluding those belonging to a subculture that strives for a specific look.