“Your one and only source”: “peripheral” fashion editorship within the transnational cultural flow. St. Petersburg publication Modnyi magazin (1862–1883)

ABSTRACT

This article discusses how a fashion editor in a culturally “peripheral” country engages with the global cultural flow as a local gate-keeper. Classifying Paris as a metropolis and St. Petersburg as (semi-)periphery, it looks at one of the earliest Russian fashion publications, Modnyi magazin (1862–83), edited by Sofia (Rekhnevskaia-)Mei. The article examines Mei’s fashion editorials referring to recent insights into fashion journalism. It particularly focuses on the dialectics between local and global fashion-related discourses within them. In this regard, it is suggested that reflections of the Swedish social anthropologist Ulf Hannerz on the metropolis-province interplay, media, and local cultural actors provide an insightful framework for identifying the potentialities of peripheral fashion journalism and the role of a local editor in realizing them – as much nowadays as in the nineteenth century.

KEYWORDS:

• Fashion editorship
• Russian fashion press
• peripheral fashion journalism
• cultural studies
• woman editor

Notes

1. Its annual circulation figures reached 6000 copies, which turned it into one of the leading publications of its time (Marks, 2001, p.104).

2. As was shown earlier, Modnyi magazin’s entire self-positioning was based on distinguishing between economic and socio-cultural capital by arguing that following the fashions of ‘the good society’ required not wealth but taste and knowledge.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the H2020 European Research Council [ERC Starting Grant agreement no. 639668].

Notes on contributors

Maria Alesina

Maria Alesina has obtained a Ph.D. in European Periodical Studies at Ghent University. In her doctoral dissertation, she studied the pre-revolutionary Russian fashion press, with a special focus on its transnational links to the West European publishing business and the role of editors as cross-cultural mediators. Dr. Alesina has an educational background in Philosophy, Political Science, and European Studies and professional experience in communications and fashion journalism.