Introduction: theorising fashion media

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 example. Threads of feminist theory were latent, but not pronounced. We have viewed the present special issue of Feminist Theory as an exciting opportunity to move these concerns to the centre, and to showcase how much fashion studies has to offer to broader feminist theoretical conversations. In so doing, we bring together topics identified by scholars as ‘integral to the study of fashion, such as identity, materiality, dress history, technology, and globalization’ (Black et al., 2013: 1) with issues similarly integral to feminist theory, including agency, embodiment and difference.

In picking up from the companion special issue of JMPS, the current collection of articles moves beyond the revered genre of the print magazine into a more diverse contemporary fashion mediascape comprising multiple genres, which allows us to reflect on the distinct affordances of each. In some ways, such a move follows intuitively on the insightful connections drawn by the contributors to ‘Magazines and/as Media’, the linked special issues of JMPS and English Studies in Canada edited by Faye Hammill, Paul Hjartarson and Hannah McGregor in 2015, which position magazines ‘as complex media artifacts whose relation to their cultural and political contexts is articulated through rhythms of seriality, patterns of remediation, and material systems of production and circulation’ (2015b: xii; see also: Hammill et al., 2015a). In attending to fashion's multiplicity across print, visual and digital media, contributors to this collection extend such analyses of remediation, production and circulation beyond the periodical form. This is not to say that print is jettisoned entirely, however. Rosie Findlay's examination of the Australian fashion magazine Russh, for example, offers an analysis of thirty-three issues from the beginning of its publication to the present (Findlay, 2022). The print magazine allows the critic to take an historical survey and facilitates the kind of ‘diagnostic’ work that Findlay undertakes here regarding the circulation of a distinctly Australian structure of feeling through this fashion text. It is one that relies both on traditional features of the fashion media – such as the themed fashion spread – and well-worn tropes of racialised gender in the Australian context, as the magazine becomes an agent of a white supremacist national imaginary. The particularity of the fashion magazine as a genre trafficking in visual images of feminine bodies, using the repetition characteristic of the serial form (see: Beetham, 2015; Mussell, 2015; Levay, 2018; Sheehan, 2018), is what shapes Russh's cohesive message. Its use of the fashionable feminine body repeated serially across the years even as fashions change, to embody the white fantasy of Australianness, offers a notably direct ideological mediation. It is not that print fashion media are not complex, Findlay's article shows, but that the print magazine's form, mostly unchanged in over a century, offers a uniquely stable space from which to trace the ways that fashion media contribute to broader discourses of gender and race.

Print is mobilised in similar ways in the J. Peterman catalogue, otherwise known as the Owner's Manual, which is the focus of Alec Pollak's article. As with Russh, the stability of the print catalogue form over time allows J. Peterman to establish a brand identity by calling on gendered, and often historical, tropes. Unlike Russh, however, as Pollak shows, Peterman's invocation of gendered tropes is knowing and satirical. The catalogue's direct and unconcealed connections to commerce distinguish it from the fashion magazine, which is directly imbricated in markets, but less obviously so. The catalogue thus offers a clear window on the connection of tropes of race and gender to the sale of fashion. It evokes, via its overblown, satirical rhetorical style, the ways that fashion often traffics in knowingness around gender as the content being sold. The catalogue as a print object mailed directly to consumers also allows us to trace the incorporation of discourses of fashion in the everyday domestic sphere (Green, 2017), something that all fashion print media share but that is especially pronounced with this genre. Pollak's article prompts us obliquely to inquire into the conditions of fashion media readership, and what it has meant for consumers to hold fashion discourses in their hands and try them on, so to speak. The article is an important reminder of the complexity of readership, as it demands that we grapple with the consumer as a knowledgeable reader, fully aware of and responding to the absurdity of fashion tropes, desiring in spite of herself.

Other articles in the collection allow us to move on from print and to consider the other ways that fashion travels. Most notably, articles by Michele White, Naveen Minai and Arti Sandhu enable us to highlight the qualities of the digital medium that has transformed the fashion system over the past two decades. White's article on Leandra Medine's very popular website, Man Repeller, picks up another variant of the satirical discursive register that Pollak traced with J. Peterman. Yet unlike Pollak's article, which introduces a knowing, agentic implied reader, White's analysis alerts us to the ways that the digital medium appears to democratise fashion by incorporating communities of users, but remains focused on high-profile content creators in many cases. The result, suggests White, is a simulacrum of a change in industry conventions, driven home by the ways that Medine's fashion coverage introduces new iterations of old, misogynistic tropes. White addresses the ways in which Man Repeller and its contributors engage in the work of ‘fashioning feminism’, which she defines as ‘a collaborative process of producing feminist positions and thinking, including the negation of certain forms of feminism’ (White, 2022).

Exploring other contemporary digital contexts, Minai addresses queer, and especially butch, fashion on Instagram, and Sandhu investigates the emergence of saree pacts on social media. These treatments of digital fashion spaces orient us to the promise of social media as a site for the mediation of fashion. As is also the case elsewhere in the collection, these articles trace the circulation of new images and uses for the fashioned body, ones that intentionally resist the narrowness – the white, slender, normatively gendered and nominally heterosexual bodies – long in evidence across fashion media. Taken together, these studies of digital media remind us of the complexity of form, and the insufficiency of any analysis of fashion media that would over-invest in the myth of fashion's digital democratisation. These articles also remind us of the creative and resistant manoeuvres of minoritised subjects within this system.

A final article in this collection introduces yet another aspect of fashion's mediation: live performance. Sara Shroff examines Sufi singer Abida Parveen's use of ajrak cloth in performance and as her performances are mediated across digital and print forms. Shroff's article allows us to consider the many different ways that dress signifies as it travels across different media, and thus distils some of the potential of fashion's complex circulation in an era when live performers remediate their fashioned bodies with ease and immediacy across platforms. In centring live performance, Shroff's article also raises the issue of embodiment, a theme that anchors most of our articles in this issue. For Shroff, Parveen's dressed body in performance does important work, as it binds together cloth and flesh to, as she writes, ‘offer a queer understanding of desire, performance and sacred becoming’ (Shroff, 2022). This formulation of the body becoming through media pushes helpfully at established understandings of fashion mediation as it presumes an agentic body and not one that is merely acted upon by a damaging fashion industry (Coleman, 2008, 2009).

Notably, in instances where liveness is not palpable, many of the representations of bodies that are analysed in this issue congeal into conventional tropes of white supremacy and a limited conception of femininity. Findlay's analysis of Russh, for example, surfaces the images of women's bodies that are typical in the magazine: photos of the model's white body as a static, mute object of desire or muse. Findlay shows how these images of young women materially embody fantasies of Australia's supposed ‘youth’, eliding the presence of Indigenous people and facilitating the sense of Australia's connection with the Euro-Western world. Here, as in so many representations over the history of fashion media, the feminine body is nothing more than a symbol, evacuated of its liveliness and pressed into ideological service.

White's article on Man Repeller, too, gestures at a ‘new’ take on what is in fact a set of very old tropes of feminine bodies. Examining the site's ‘man-repelling’ ethos, which is ostensibly about styling women's bodies in ways that refuse or divest from a male gaze, White finds that underneath the site's satirical tone and professed commitment to feminism lies a restatement of women's bodies as violable objects whose worth turns on their sexual desirability. Pollak's study of the satirical J. Peterman catalogue likewise brings to the fore a set of desiccated tropes of gendered bodies – as straightforwardly legible cultural ‘types’ (Conor, 2012, 2013, 2015) – that is notable for its stasis. While the catalogue content that Pollak examines is more ambiguous and potentially more open to resignification than the bodies presented in Russh or Man Repeller, it underscores a connection to a long history of fashion media trading in static images of women's bodies.

Yet these images of stasis are balanced by powerful examples of the lively body in this issue, ensuring that we do not close the door on the emergent potential of fashion media. Minai's article, for example, traces how racialised women use ‘masculine of center’ clothing (Rand, 2017) to fashion their bodies as objects of desire and sites of play. Here, the digitally reproduced body is connected to the liveness of those subjects, as Minai traces the development of a set of visual codes for butch women that break with conventional representations of fashionable women's bodies and align with butches’ own sense of their embodiment. Sandhu's article dovetails with Minai's analysis in its documentation of the remediation of saree-clad women's bodies on social media. This instance of documentation of everyday dress practices provides a powerful visual counter-narrative to white ideals of the fashionable feminine body, and underscores the resistant uses to which social media puts dress. It emerges that the sense of lived embodiment that social media can circulate is one of its chief potentials, for feminist critics.

Of course, what distinguishes Minai's and Sandhu's pieces and does much to contribute to the sense of liveliness is the foregrounding of articulation between body and garments. For Minai, the relationship between body and suit matters, and for Sandhu, the saree–body nexus is uniquely powerful, as the saree becomes an ‘agential garment that connects fashion to feminism’ (Sandhu, 2022). This sense of agency is also evident in Shroff's analysis of ajrak as sacred cloth, which, when mediated on Parveen's body, effectively queers not only Parveen and her musical and performance practice, but a constellation of other institutions. Something similar is true of the saree-clad bodies circulating through social media's saree pacts; the use of a ‘traditional’ garment in this way does important work in disrupting conventional assumptions about South Asian women. In this case, as with Minai's and Shroff's examples, it is precisely the articulation of body, material garment and medium that affords the disruption.

The interaction between body, garment and medium has been of particular interest for fashion scholars such as Joanne Entwistle (2000, 2001), who theorises dress as an ‘embodied practice’, and also for scholars of queer theory and transgender studies, whose work deconstructs binary understandings of gender, identity and identification by theorising performance, fantasy, pleasure and affect (Fuss, 1992; Muñoz, 1999; Rand, 2017). Drawing on Lucia Ruggerone's work, which links clothing, embodiment and affect in a shift from ‘what the body is’ to a focus on ‘what the body can do, namely what it can become through encounters with other bodies endowed with their own set of affective (material and immaterial) capabilities’ (Ruggerone, 2016: 579; emphasis in original), Shroff describes Abida Parveen's approach to dress as an ‘embodied practice of affective clothing’ (Shroff, 2022), thereby engaging a theme shared among several articles in this collection: the ways in which fashion and clothing enable a resistance to and undermining of gender binaries, both in fantasy and in practice.

As the feminist film scholar Elizabeth Cowie notes, the pleasure of fantasy can be connected to the concept of ‘mise en scene’, in its emphasis on the material elements (such as setting, props, costumes and aspects of performance) involved in the arrangement, or ‘setting out of, desire’ (1997: 133). We have noted how Minai's article on butch digital fashion opens up new possibilities for conceptions of gender, embodiment and pleasure; it does so precisely through the invocation of fantasy as a key element of pleasure connected to the ability to (re)mould fashion in accordance with one's desires. However, Minai reminds us that fantasy is ‘embedded within frames of capital that structure ideals of beauty, desirability, and aspiration’ (Minai, 2022), a point that resonates with Rosie Findlay's (2019) work on ‘aspirational realness’ in the digital culture of fashion and beauty branding. Pollak's article on the J. Peterman catalogue likewise underscores the ambivalent potential of garments to invoke fantasies that both shore up and destabilise gendered binaries: analysing the hyperbolic language used to invest clothing with ‘sartorial potency’, often in accordance with normative conceptions of gender and sexuality, Pollak then turns the normative assumption on its head, arguing that ‘sartorial potencies, accrued over time and across various (and often competing) historical configurations of gender, sexuality, and desire, come to persist independently of body type or gender identity, endowing objects with communicative potential beyond the desire for specific behaviours and experiences, and certainly beyond prescriptions of mainstream advertising semiotics’ (Pollak, 2022). The potential for garments to be appropriated and repurposed beyond normative prescriptions of gender resonates with what Karen de Perthuis and Rosie Findlay have described, in reference to the gender-non-conforming performance artist and social media influencer Alok Vaid-Menon (@alokvmenon), as ‘alternative fashionable ideals that operate in opposition to the dominant fashionable ideal’ (2019: 223). Again reminding us of the ambiguity of fantasy, however, White's article on Man Repeller shows how what seem to be alternative fashionable ideals can be harnessed – in part through Leandra Medine's fantastical photo shoots – in the service of misogyny. Altogether, the collected articles do much to orient us away from tired binaries in understanding fashion and fashion media. The authors produce a deeply contextual account of fashion media as neither wholly emancipatory nor straightforwardly oppressive.

On a final note, in referencing the ways in which late twentieth- and twenty-first-century fashion travels across media forms and platforms, we also wish to highlight the geographic range of the articles represented here – treating contexts ranging from India, Pakistan and the global South, to Australia, Europe and the United States – as well as the global circulation of fashionable identities. In this way, we hope to complement the work of scholars whose research centres intersectional perspectives on fashion and beauty culture in a transnational context (Tu, 2011; Ochoa, 2014; Reddy, 2016; Heijin Lee et al., 2019; Dosekun, 2020). Drawing on Michel de Certeau's theorisation of space as a ‘practiced place’ (1984: 117), we see the invocation of place as a method for understanding the ways in which fashion engages conceptions of spatial practice as well as geography, landscape and setting. To be sure, specificity of place is central to the readings offered here: white supremacist narratives shape the presentation of fashionability in Russh, and J. Peterman's Owner's Manual traffics in particular conceptions of ‘American’ culture, such as the association of denim with rugged masculinity and fantasies of the ‘west’ that disavow the realities of settler colonialism. But space is also invoked in the interpretive practice of fashion by its users, as exemplified by saree wearers’ connecting across borders via social media, and by the presence of the city as a backdrop for the performance of queer desire and pleasure in butch digital fashion cultures. In bringing together a collection of articles that theorise fashion media's relationship to feminism, gender and sexuality, race and global consumer culture, we also hope to contribute to current scholarly conversations that are expanding the spatial orthodoxies of fashion studies as they decolonise the field.

Indeed, the reach of these articles, which range across genres, national and cultural boundaries, methodologies and ideological registers, is a hopeful sign. They offer clear evidence that the kinds of concerns and approaches that animate feminist theory – especially those to do with agency, embodiment and materiality – resonate with fashion studies, a field that is currently undergoing a reflexive reckoning. Studies of fashion media are especially germane to this meeting of fields, for in orienting us to the complex space between representation and interpretation, they provide a template for thinking about the ambiguity of fashion more broadly, which feminist scholars are well positioned to theorise. We thus present this set of articles with the hope that they will draw together scholars in fashion media studies and feminist theory, who stand to gain so much from sharing tools and approaches.