Fashioning Cultural Criticism: An Inquiry into Fashion Criticism and its Delay in Legitimization

Abstract

The article interrogates the reasons behind the delay in legitimization of fashion criticism as articulated within the domain of journalistic writings, particularly in relation to other forms of popular culture criticism, such as film or music. Fashion remains, in the words of one prominent fashion critic, “culturally beneath regard” within the hierarchies of cultural criticism. The article investigates the gender specificity that contributed to its lack of status, particularly in relation to the historical connection between fashion and femininity. The connection between the two is made evident by the way the changes in fashion criticism in the press-mediated changes in women’s social roles, as evident with the change in newspaper nomenclature of fashion sections in the 1960s and 1970s from women’s pages to style sections. Focusing on a few under-researched critics working primarily in newspapers and general interest magazines in the U.S.A., the article examines the way fashion criticism gained momentum at the end of the twentieth century, and is slowly becoming legitimized as a form of cultural criticism—a fact punctuated by the Pulitzer Prize being given for the first time to a fashion critic (The Washington Post’s Robin Givhan).

Keywords:

• cultural criticism
• gender
• journalism
• legitimization

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the School of Art and Design History and Theory and the MA Fashion Studies at Parsons for supporting a panel on fashion criticism, which informed this article. I would also like to thank Van Dyk Lewis and Alice Twemlow for inviting me to present an earlier version of this paper at Cornell University and the School of Visual Arts, respectively. My thanks also go to Judith Thurman and the other critics who took the time to share their views on fashion criticism. Finally, I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback.

Notes

1. A similar imbalance in legitimization can be traced in U.S. academia, where the study of film, in particular, has gained a much firmer footing when compared to fashion (Granata, 2012).

2. The fact that Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly took on a feminine pseudonym to write about fashion—a reversal mirrored by Mallarmé’s adoption of female pseudonyms for La Dernière mode, the fashion magazine he started in 1874—is further proof of the tight knit connection between women and fashion criticism.

3. Parallels could be observed with Agnès Rocamora’s astute argument on the centrality of La Parisienne to French fashion in Fashioning the City, London: I.B. Tauris, 2009.

4. As with other areas of fashion criticism, research has increased in the last few years (MacDonell 2017).

5. Among other important titles that require further study within the categories of general interest magazines and newspapers would be Vanity Fair, which ceased publications in 1936 and was revamped in 1983. The New York Herald Tribune, which ceased publication in 1966, also provides an important chapter in the history of fashion criticism thanks in great part to the writings of the fashion critic Eugenia Sheppard, who was active at the paper in the 1950s and 1960s.

6. I thank Shannon Bell Price for introducing me to the work of Louise Norton and sharing with me her research on Rogue magazine and Dada.

7. Tebbel and Zuckerman argue that The New Yorker in part proved that these qualities could eventually be found beyond the little (1991, 219).

8. Although more research is certainly needed, particularly in the general press, an important work on the intersection of race gender and fashion writing is Noliwe M. Rooks’s Ladies’ Pages: African American Women’s Magazines and the Culture that Made Them (New Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press, 2004).

9. The New York Times approached its transition to the “style” pages differently than other papers by initially “establishing five rotating sections, one for each day of the week” (Mills 1990, 119).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Francesca Granata

Francesca Granata is Director of the MA Fashion Studies and Assistant Professor at Parsons School of Design. She is the editor of the non-profit journal Fashion Projects and the author of Experimental Fashion: Performance Art, Carnival and the Grotesque Body (IB Tauris, 2017). Currently, she is researching the history of fashion criticism. [email protected]