More Than Just A Fashion Magazine
What are
the purposes of a fashion magazine? To inform readers of the latest fashions,
of who is wearing what in the entertainment world, and where they may find the
clothes shown in its pages every month? To provide a venue for advertisers to
reach a readership potentially interested in their – primarily fashion and
beauty – products, and generally to provide a supportive editorial environment
that encourages firms like Chanel, Gucci, Dior, and LVMH to place advertising
regularly so that the magazine’s publisher can stay in business and make a
profit? To appeal to and reassure – the possibly fragile egos of – fashion
designers, photographers, models, makeup artists, hair stylists and everyone
else working in the fashion world by displaying and praising their work?
This article examines the intricate relationships
that are continuously being negotiated between fashion magazine staff, the
advertisers upon whose budgets they rely, the fashion world of which they form
a part and with which they interact on a regular basis, and their readers. I
will focus in particular on the different kinds of readers magazines address
and analyse the latter’s position in the world of fashion in the context of
what has been written about art worlds.
Research underpinning the essay consisted of
more than 40 open-ended interviews with fashion magazine publishers, (feature,
fashion, beauty) editors, and art directors working in Paris,
London, New York,
Tokyo and Hong Kong.
It covered four international fashion magazines – Vogue, Elle, Harper’s
Bazaar and Marie Claire –
published over a decade between 1995 and 2005 in the five countries
concerned, and positioned vis-Ã -vis competing titles (both local and
international) within their different magazine industries. One main aim was to
find out how women - and issues relating to women - were, or were not, represented
differently by these four titles (two American, two French) in various parts of
Europe, Asia and the USA.
As a social anthropologist accustomed to
carrying out long-term participant observation among a selected group of people
(the locus classicus of anthropological fieldwork), I would have
preferred to supplement this kind of ‘network-based fieldwork’ (Moeran 2005:
198-9), in which I was passed along a chain of contacts from one editor or art
director to another around the world, with a more standard ethnographic study
of at least one cycle of magazine production (or ‘frame-based fieldwork’).
There are at least two reasons for this. Firstly, it is only through actually
working on a project oneself that one comes to experience and understand its
underlying social processes and unstated assumptions physically (as
opposed to intellectually). In other words, I believe that an important aim of
fieldwork should be the acquisition of knowledge through embodied experience.
Secondly, previous frame-based fieldwork (in a pottery community and
advertising agency) suggests that there is invariably some disparity between
what people say they do and what they actually do (however well
meaning they may be in their explanations and answers to questions). The job of
the fieldworker is to prise apart informants’ own theory and situated action.
During the course of this particular
research, alas, I was unable to gain permission to witness a magazine
production cycle.[i]
Although I was able to participate in and observe a studio fashion shoot in
Hong Kong, and the shooting of two hair product ad campaigns in Tokyo, I have
in very large part had to rely on what I have been told during interviews, and
make my own subjective interpretations (on the basis of what I have read and
heard elsewhere) of the extent to which my informants were telling the truth,
the whole truth, and nothing but the truth as they perceived it, or were
unconsciously, subconsciously, or consciously presenting a rather more glowing
picture of that unattainable truth.[ii] As part
of this subjective interpretation, I should add that, overall, I was very
impressed by the apparent openness with which those concerned - for the most part women - spoke to me about the hectic
world in which they worked and struggled every month to create a product that
was meaningful to their readers, to the fashion world of which they were a
part, to their advertisers, and to themselves.
Because of these difficulties, but also
because of the very nature of fashion magazines, which act as pivotal
intermediaries in the value chain between upstream suppliers and downstream
customers in the fashion industry, I found myself paying considerable attention
to the magazines themselves as written texts and image banks. This focus on
content analysis has been used both to endorse and to question what my
informants told me during interviews.
[i] I am not the only one to fail in
this task. Gough-Yates (2003:21-23) recounts similar difficulties - compounded, perhaps, by the fact
that she was a woman - in her attempts to conduct ethnography
among British women’s magazines. My impression is that I was treated far better.
No interviews were summarily cancelled; no interview lasted less than an hour,
and several went up to and beyond two hours. I am extremely grateful to all
those concerned for their goodwill, time and patience, as well as to the Danish
Research Agency for funding my study.
[ii] I should add that I have
benefited enormously from my year’s fieldwork in a Japanese advertising agency
where I spent considerable time learning about media organizations’ activities
(Moeran 1996).
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