Stylists have become increasingly influential in shaping fashion imagery. They have moved from the backstage, as unrecognised players, to the frontstage of fashion, becoming celebrated for their ...creative work as image makers for magazines, advertising and fashion designers. Yet little is known about the profession, its diverse incarnations and its aesthetic economy. Featuring contributions from leading experts and stylists, this collection is the first to explore the history, meaning and practice of fashion styling through interviews and historic and present-day case studies.Featuring in-depth contributions from prominent fashion scholars, chapters span historical periods, cultural contexts and theoretical frameworks, employing a range of methodologies in the international case studies upon which they're based. Interspersed with interviews with innovative fashion stylists working today, and drawing on examples from advertising, the catwalk and magazines, this book explores the challenges faced by stylists in a fashion system increasingly shaped by commercial pressures and by growing numbers of collections and seasons.Fashion Stylists is an invaluable resource for students and professionals interested in image-making, the representation of style and fashion, entrepreneurship and the history of fashion professionals.
This article is a part of a wider examination of a recent genre of fashion magazines, "niche fashion magazines," that emerged in the 1990s. Growing out of style magazines, glossies, and art journals, ...niche fashion magazines have a hybridized quality that straddles art, style cultures, and high fashion. Drawing on the work of Bourdieu, I argue that the genre belongs to the "subfield of restricted production," and intrinsic to niche fashion magazines is their complex, and rather elitist, mediation of fashion as ironic, artistic, and intellectual. Although they are positioned outside of the mainstream, their financial underpinning is advertising revenue, and they are, thus, not outside commercial interests. The central aim of this article is to explore contemporary niche fashion magazines, their underpinning values, and their position in the field of fashion.
While scholars have explored some areas of cultural production in fashion-including photography and modelling-styling has not received substantial attention. As a result, we know very little of the ...history of styling and its actual practice. This article examines how the stylist emerged as a new profession within fashion magazines in the 1960s and was established as profession in its own right by the 1980s. In addition to uncovering the roots of editorial styling, the article explores the cultural and economic practices of styling for fashion magazines in the present day. It argues that the aesthetic practices of editorial styling today are inextricably linked to the economic values of the field of fashion. The findings are part of a wider project on the practice of styling. As a "cultural intermediary," the stylist occupies a creative position between the designer and the consumer, but s/he is not simply mediating fashion according to the designer's vision; the stylist's own aesthetic interpretations and dispositions shape how fashion is mediated. Yet these are not given free reign but shaped by complex symbolic and economic negotiations with advertisers and press offices.
This thesis examines contemporary niche fashion magazines and uses as a case study an ethnographic investigation of a niche fashion magazine and its producers and readers. Fashion magazines are ...instrumental not only in helping readers make sense of, understand and consume fashion; they are themselves fashionable media that set trends in how fashion is mediated. Niche fashion magazines are a sub genre of fashion magazines that is produced and consumed by cultural intermediaries. They are part of a complex cultural circuit which involves their marketing, production, circulation, textual representations and readers' consumption. Within this circuit values, meanings, codes, notions and practices of fashion are exchanged, and these are the focus of this thesis. This thesis examines the niche fashion magazine genre, addressing its hybridised quality of art, popular culture, high fashion, elite and edge. Through active participant observation, the case study explores the production practices and the different economies and values that inform the encoding of fashion into the magazine. Drawing on in-depth interviews with niche fashion magazine readers, the thesis also explores how readers make sense of niche fashion magazines by engaging with their symbolic value. Within the fashion press niche fashion magazines are the focal media for the tastemakers of fashion. Yet niche fashion magazines as an object of inquiry has been neglected by academia, which has paid more attention to women's and men's magazines and their textual representations. A central aim of this thesis is to contribute to an understanding of the meanings of fashion mediation with a specific focus on the methodological integration of textual, consumption and production analysis. By generating new insight as to how fashion is exchanged and mediated between producers and readers of niche fashion magazines it contributes to the study of fashion within sociology and media research.
This thesis examines contemporary niche fashion magazines and uses as a case study an ethnographic investigation of a niche fashion magazine and its producers and readers. Fashion magazines are ...instrumental not only in helping readers make sense of, understand and consume fashion; they are themselves fashionable media that set trends in how fashion is mediated. Niche fashion magazines are a sub genre of fashion magazines that is produced and consumed by cultural intermediaries. They are part of a complex cultural circuit which involves their marketing, production, circulation, textual representations and readers' consumption. Within this circuit values, meanings, codes, notions and practices of fashion are exchanged, and these are the focus of this thesis. This thesis examines the niche fashion magazine genre, addressing its hybridised quality of art, popular culture, high fashion, elite and edge. Through active participant observation, the case study explores the production practices and the different economies and values that inform the encoding of fashion into the magazine. Drawing on in-depth interviews with niche fashion magazine readers, the thesis also explores how readers make sense of niche fashion magazines by engaging with their symbolic value. Within the fashion press niche fashion magazines are the focal media for the tastemakers of fashion. Yet niche fashion magazines as an object of inquiry has been neglected by academia, which has paid more attention to women's and men's magazines and their textual representations. A central aim of this thesis is to contribute to an understanding of the meanings of fashion mediation with a specific focus on the methodological integration of textual, consumption and production analysis. By generating new insight as to how fashion is exchanged and mediated between producers and readers of niche fashion magazines it contributes to the study of fashion within sociology and media research.
