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.
