Introduction: theorising fashion media

Abstract

Though scholars have built a vibrant literature on fashion media (e.g. Rocamora, 2009, 2013, 2017 2012; Bartlett et al., 2013; Van De Peer, 2014; Van De Peer, 2015), there has been near silence on the issue of fashion media among feminist critics, with a few exceptions (e.g. Rabine, 1994; Lewis, 1997, 2013, 2015; Pham, 2011; Pham, 2014; Pham, 2015; Findlay, 2019; Titton, 2019; Filippello, 2020). In particular, there has been little attention paid to fashion media as a feminist theoretical issue. Yet, as the articles gathered in this collection make clear, fashion media resonate with a number of contemporary feminist theoretical concerns, including temporality, materiality, embodiment, neoliberalism and racialisation, as well as with debates over postfeminism and popular feminism (Banet-Weiser et al., 2020). Over the last two decades in particular, fashion media have seemed to ‘democratise’ with the rise of street-style features and the prominence of fashion blogging, and the industry has very vocally – though perhaps not substantively – joined cultural conversations about diversity and inclusion. All of this makes for a moment ripe for feminist scholars. In facilitating this feminist theoretical intervention into conversations about fashion media, this special issue follows from our co-edited issue of the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies (JMPS, 2020) on the theme of ‘Fashion in the Magazines’, which covered the period from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. In that issue, we brought together six articles on diverse topics, which treated the appearance of fashion across fashion magazines such as US Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and the French periodical La Gazette du Bon Ton, magazines not geared towards fashion such as the British humour magazine Punch and the department store periodical Charm, as well as daily newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune and the New York Evening Sun, among others. Most of the articles in that excellent collection were implicitly subtended by feminist theoretical work: on representation, historicity and materiality, for