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

Abstract

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.