THE MEDIA
THE MEDIA
GLOSSARY
blog A webpage that is regularly updated by an individual, or small group of people, usually focused on a particular subject, their opinions, or interests, and which welcomes comments and interaction with readers. Fashion blogs naturally focus on various facets of the fashion industry and use lots of images. The immediate feedback they provide, for example on designer collections, has become particularly influential.
color-blocking Wearing two or more, usually bold and bright, contrasting colors in one outfit. These can be separate pieces put together or a garment designed with blocks of solid color, without any print or pattern.
editorial These are photographs that are commissioned by, and published in, magazines and newspapers. They support the written word alongside them and will often tell a story or communicate an idea through a series of photographs. They sit alongside advertising photography, particularly in magazines.
front row Closest to the runway at a fashion show, the front row is the most prestigious place to be seated and, by default, a way of telling who is most influential in the fashion world for that particular designer. Generally the front row is reserved for the most important fashion editors and a designer’s celebrity clients, who may garner media coverage for the collection.
glossy magazine Printed on high-quality, shiny paper, these magazines focus on elite fashion, including couture and ready-to-wear, supported by pages of high-end advertising. They present color images of the current collections, often shot by renowned photographers and worn by famous models and help shape the season for mainstream fashion. Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar are perhaps the best-known titles and have longevity, with both magazines having been published for more than a hundred years.
New Look Christian Dior’s first solo collection shown in Paris in February 1947, which featured very full skirts falling from a cinched waist and sloping shoulders, was referred to as the “New Look” by fashion editors present for the show. The feminine look and copious use of fabric contrasted starkly with the wartime austerity and clothes rationing that contemporaries were used to.
September issue For a fashion magazine, traditionally the most important, and biggest, issue of the year. It launches the new fall/winter collections and, in a way, a new fashion year.
signature style The unique way that an individual dresses which then becomes immediately identifiable as belonging only to that person. It expresses their aesthetics and their public persona and may in turn, influence others if, for example, they are well-known or work in the fashion industry.
social media An umbrella term for internet media that allows users to interact, share, and exchange information, whether text, video, images, or other multimedia, and create social and professional online networks.
stylist A stylist is a curator, responsible for coordinating the whole outfit, from clothing to accessories, selecting pieces that will work well both together and on the body of the person wearing it. They can work in many different areas from runway shows to magazine editorial shoots and collaborate with designers, photographers, makeup artists, and art directors, to ensure the best visual image possible.
Web 2.0 A term given to the gradual development of the World Wide Web, which now allows interaction and collaboration, with the building of web-based communities such as blogging and social media, rather than just the passive viewing of content.
THE GLOSSIES
Deriving their collective term from the glossed paper on which they are printed, “the glossies” are a select group of high-end luxury fashion magazines. By merging fashion imagery, beauty advice, lifestyle journalism, and coverage of social events, the formula of “the glossy” has remained relatively unchanged since the introduction of the first regular fashion magazine, The Lady’s Magazine, in the 1770s. Titles such as Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, and Marie Claire have cultivated their own styles while remaining a cornerstone of the fashion industry through their highly commercial approach and close links with advertisers, who significantly influence the content of an issue. The function of the glossy, however, extends beyond that of mere promotion of the latest trends. Documenting shifts across contemporary culture, they form an authoritative filter through which changing ideals of identity, beauty, and femininity are reflected and constructed. Their combination of text and imagery translates trends into a comprehensible consumer language, suggesting new identities and validating existing ones. The establishment of international editions provides a space for the projection of culture-specific ideals while reflecting the increasing global reach and influence of the contemporary fashion industry.
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As a group of luxury fashion publications, “the glossies” present an authoritative curation of current fashion trends, in order to create desire, pleasure, and meaning.
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The advent of the Internet prompted a decline in the sales of fashion print media, with the immediacy of online formats providing readers with an accessible and unedited alternative source of fashion imagery and reportage. Luxury online fashion retailer Net-a-porter.com, however, successfully reversed this trend with the 2014 launch of a glossy print magazine Porter, which symbolized a return of the magazine as a desirable and aspirational fashion object in its own right.
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CONDÉ MONTROSE NAST
1873–1942
Publisher who founded Condé Nast Publications in 1909
DIANA VREELAND
1903–89
Influential fashion editor known as “The Empress of Fashion”
ANNA WINTOUR
1949–
Editor-in-Chief of American Vogue since 1988 and Artistic Director of Condé Nast Publications since 2013
EXPERT
Julia Rea
Glossies offer readers a curated selection of escapism, fantasy, spectacle, and aspiration.
EDITORIAL
An editorial is a series of photographs commissioned by a magazine that appear together either online or in print. Rather than merely showcasing things for sale, they attempt to capture a mood, feeling, or idea through the use of garments, accessories, and beauty products. Although distinct narratives and even individual garments may be difficult to decipher, they offer a glimpse at a stylized world and wearer for the season’s latest clothes. Editorials are collaborative efforts that involve designers, stylists, models, magazine editors, and photographers. The choice of location, assembly of looks and the individuals—both in front of and behind the camera—all shape the resulting images. In a sense, fashion editorials imbue the garments they depict with the mood and ideas the photographs communicate. While a floor-length burgundy wool coat is quite traditional in its construction, when worn by model/actress Tilda Swinton and photographed by Tim Walker, it becomes a futuristic uniform, modern, slick, and au courant. By capturing an imagined moment, such as that which the camera fixes in front of its lens, fashion editorials gesture at larger desires, both socially and style-wise, simultaneously tapping into desire and creating demand.
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While advertisements aim to sell the products they depict, editorials capture something less tangible—the feeling or mood of a season—through accessories and clothing.
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In 1947, when Dior introduced the New Look, American photographer Richard Avedon seized upon it to make cinematic images in which the models appeared in motion, wearing the clothes like characters in a movie. Today, photographers such as Tim Walker—who worked as an assistant to Avedon at the start of his career—create elaborate settings and spaces in which to stage the season’s latest clothes.
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RICHARD AVEDON
1923–2004
Noted photographer whose work redefined fashion photography
TIM WALKER
1970–
Prominent photographer whose work has shaped the look of Vogue for over a decade
EXPERT
Rebecca Straub
Familiar to anyone who has thumbed through the pages of Vogue, editorials capture and create fashion’s photographic fantasies.
ADVERTISING
Fashion advertising has typically consisted of visual representations of garments and accessories. Be they the hand-colored illustrations of the first regular fashion magazines of the late eighteenth century, or controversial Calvin Klein Underwear ads in the 1990s, high-end fashion houses create seasonal advertisements shot by leading photographers and purchase ad space in glossy magazines such as Vogue and Elle. Both the September and March issues devote a majority of their content to advertising, thus they are important not only for ushering in the look of a new season, but also for ad sales, with clients vying for desirable placement among their pages. Yet, as is the case with the fashions portrayed, advertising is equally subject to the tastes of industries in constant flux. While fashion advertising has historically been tied to magazines, increasingly new forms of media are employed to expand consumer bases and access wider audiences no longer bound by geography or by time. The adoption of digital strategies by fashion advertisers follows with larger market trends. Online advertising expenses in the United States, which include publications, video, search engine keywords, and email marketing, now exceed the $111.5 billion spent on print.
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Fashion advertisements often feature actors, models, and other famous faces with the intent to sell the products or projected lifestyles they picture.
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Online advertising does not merely place content on websites. Instead, the most growth has occurred in the realms of social media and network building. In bypassing traditional print-based media, brands reach larger audiences without purchasing ad space. Chanel’s Instagram feed boasts 4.9 million followers, far exceeding American Vogue, which has a total average circulation of only 1.2 million, including both paid subscriptions and single copy purchasers.
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BRUCE WEBER
1946–
Photographer known for his advertising work for Calvin Klein, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Versace
INEZ VAN LAMSWEERDE & VINOODH MATADIN
1963– & 1961–
Fashion photographers responsible for iconic Dior, Givenchy, and Balenciaga campaigns
EXPERT
Rebecca Straub
Often resulting in images that resemble editorial features, advertising aims to sell the fashions and fragrances it pictures.
STYLE MAGAZINES
Though known for glamor and excess, the 1980s also gave rise to an increasingly visible flip-side of high fashion. Style magazines such as Arena, BLITZ, i-D, and The Face combined music, politics, pop culture, and street style, to describe fashion in the world and off the runway. In the wake of punk and other such DIY movements, style magazines created a public platform outside mainstream fashion media. In 1980, Nick Logan started The Face to “escape from struggling to explain myself to publishers…” Free from such restriction, style magazines attempted to document the look and feel of youth culture as much as the music and fashion on which they reported. i-D introduced the “Straight-Up” street portrait, shot outside against a blank wall, which offered a detailed picture of British teens, and traced trends amongst their efforts at self-fashioning. Stylists including Ray Petri, a favorite of both i-D and The Face, created many of the iconic images associated with style magazines. Using street-cast models, Petri brought diversity to an often whitewashed industry, and androgyny to one built on gender binaries. The look was both assertive and eclectic, and The Face was hailed as the UK’s newest “style-bible.” Magazines that documented fashion trends at the margins were now setting them for the mainstream.
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Although it is now commonplace to see entire blogs devoted to how people dress, style magazines paved the way for the industry’s and consumers’ interest in street style.
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Photography played a large role in defining the visual identities of individual style magazines. Notable photographers such as Nick Knight, Corinne Day, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Juergen Teller all created pictures that pushed at the boundaries of what was considered fashion photography. Their raw and seemingly unstaged images of real bodies—acne, bruises, and all—stood in stark contrast to the hourglass figures and perfectly coiffed hair in the pages of Vogue.
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TERRY JONES
1945–
Formerly the art director of British Vogue, cofounded i-D magazine
NICK LOGAN
1947–
Credited with inventing style magazines by launching The Face in 1980
CORINNE DAY
1962–2010
Photographer whose subversive take on fashion photographs resulted in some of the first published images of Kate Moss in The Face in 1990
EXPERT
Rebecca Straub
Style magazines look beyond mainstream and high fashion to define what’s cool.
STYLISTS
The fashion stylist has become one of the industry’s most influential figures, lending their creative vision to the production of fashion shows, magazine editorials, and advertising campaigns. Formerly working solely behind the scenes, the top stylists are now high-profile figures in their own right, each cultivating their own signature style identity and methodology. The notion of collaboration remains central to the work of a stylist, both through the working process itself and through their employment as creative consultants and contributing editors to designers, brands, and publications. Katy England, for example, is renowned for her long-term creative partnership with Alexander McQueen, styling his shows and providing sources of design inspiration that helped to shape his aesthetic. Through their instinctive interpretation and, often, subversion of a brand’s creative vision, stylists combine and alter garments, utilize accessories, and coordinate hair and makeup in unexpected and exciting ways, in order to construct a coherent image, injecting an aesthetic with essential narrative. Stylists are increasingly stepping outside the confines of the commercial and pushing the boundaries of fashion imagery by infusing each final image or collection with imagination, fantasy, and, at times, a vital dose of realism.
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Through a closely collaborative relationship, the stylist is instrumental in shaping and articulating the creative vision and constructing the identity of designers, brands, and publications.
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Stylists have the power to cross the boundary into popular culture, creating iconic and enduring fashion imagery. British stylist Melanie Ward, for example, collaborated with photographer Corinne Day on the iconic cover story of The Face magazine’s July 1990 issue, launching the career of model Kate Moss. Ward blended a barefaced Moss, knitted sweaters, nudity, and feathered headdresses to create a naturalistic series of images that both captured and defined the mood of a generation.
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GRACE CODDINGTON
1941–
British former model and stylist who has been Creative Director at American Vogue since 1988
ISABELLA BLOW
1958–2007
Stylist and editor renowned for her extrovert personal style and for nurturing the careers of designer Alexander McQueen and milliner Philip Treacy
EXPERT
Julia Rea
Stylists unite the different elements of an image in order to create a coherent narrative.
BLOGS
A fashion blog is an online journal devoted to fashion and individual outfit choices. The first fashion blogs appeared in the early 2000s and aimed to express the personal style of independent enthusiasts who were not professionally connected with the industry. Up until then, the traditional fashion media—magazines and newspaper columns—were the main channels of information, but with the emergence of Web 2.0. the number of fashion blogs quickly increased. Combining photographs with short texts, sharing the stories of their favorite pieces and their shopping secrets, the authors constructed a unique space for self-presentation, attracting numerous fans. Bloggers interact with their readers and this two-way communication creates a sense of shared values. In recent years, blogs have become increasingly influenced by commerce with sponsored posts and advertising space. The most successful bloggers can become celebrities in their own right, sometimes given seats on the front row at shows. Chiara Ferragni of The Blonde Salad, Nicole Warne of Gary Pepper Girl, and Zanita Whittington of Zanita.com.au appeared on the cover of fashion magazine Lucky in 2015. Bloggers have also collaborated with fashion brands, for example Jane Aldridge with Urban Outfitters and Tavi Gevinson with ModCloth.
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From their humble amateur beginnings at the birth of user-generated online content, fashion bloggers have become increasingly professional and influential within the industry.
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Fashion blogs are used not only for self-branding, but also for activism. They create spaces of empowerment for people who are traditionally marginalized by the fashion industry and Western-oriented values, such as plus-sized women or people from ethnic minorities.
3-SECOND BIOGRAPHIES
BRYAN YAMBAO
1981–
Author of Bryanboy, famous for his signature pose
CHIARA FERRAGNI
1987–
Author of The Blonde Salad
EXPERT
Olga Vainshtein
Blogs offer an alternative, more personal, take on the fashion industry than the mainstream media.
