Niche Fashion Magazines

Changing the Shape of Fashion

Ane Lynge-Jorlen

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781784531478
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786721792
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Fashion Design

Niche fashion magazines speak to a highly fashion literate readership and mix the codes of style magazines, glossy women's magazines and art catalogues. They are often produced and read by people engaged in the business of creating fashion taste. Through this business-to-business practice, the niche magazine genre is powerful in shaping the face of fashion. Based on unique analysis of niche fashion magazines and unprecedented access to the making of the respected Danish niche fashion magazine, DANSK, including interviews with its makers and its readers, this book unveils the behind-the-scenes of niche fashion magazines. It pays special attention to the symbolic and material cultures, as well as the values and meanings that are shared across magazine producers and their readers. It is a valuable contribution to the study and practice of fashion journalism, with appeal to students and readers of the increasingly popular high-end glossy magazines.

1

FASHION MAGAZINES BELOW THE RADAR

When I worked as a model in my early twenties, I believed that working for a certain type of fashion magazine was highly prestigious. To adorn the pages of fashion magazines with experimental photography and high production values was something I did gladly without being paid economically. The magazines were cool, ‘high cultural’ and represented the promise of a potentially financially rewarding future. Within the cacophony of still and moving images, texts and sounds of fashion across media, some formats of fashion mediation are considered more prestigious. Why is that? And how do these über magazines become meaningful to their producers and readers? Niche fashion magazines are incubators of fashion; they are a site for experimentation and exclusive fashion mediation. While they are important as textual and material objects, studying them also conveys the career experiences of those working in the higher strata of the visual culture of fashion.

This book analyses the role and value of niche fashion magazines and their production and consumption. I use DANSK, a Danish niche fashion magazine that is published in English and distributed internationally, as a case study to throw light on the production and consumption practices of niche fashion magazines but also on the wider fashion media and fashion industry. The book combines unparalleled insider access to how a niche fashion magazine is made with reader response material. Niche fashion magazines make up a ‘circuit of culture’ (Johnson 1986; du Gay et al. 2003) of production, representation and consumption. This culture, and the way meaning is constituted within it, cannot be understood without looking at the whole circuit through which the magazine passes. The circuit includes regulation, production, consumption, representation and identity. These together provide ‘a shared cultural space in which meaning is created, shaped, modified, and recreated’ (Curtin and Gaither 2007: 37–8). While there is no beginning or end, the various moments are distinct and important to the production of cultural meaning. Within the circuit of the culture model, the emphasis is thus on culture as a process. I look at the three key moments of such a culture: representation, production and consumption.

The book explores the values, codes and meanings that are exchanged and shared within the niche fashion magazine circuit. What is it that these magazines offer, and how are they different from women’s magazines? What kind of fashion culture do they belong to? How do they become meaningful to their readers? What social and material practices and values underpin their production? What cultural meanings circulate within and across the magazines, from the producers to the text and to the readers? How do readers understand the producers of niche fashion magazines as well as other readers? And how do producers relate to their readers as well as other producers? The qualitative case study of a Danish niche fashion magazine DANSK – through its producers and readers – allows me to answer these questions.

WHAT IS A NICHE FASHION MAGAZINE?

Below the radar of the mainstream, but required reading for the movers and doyennes of the art and fashion world, magazines like 032c are successfully finding a niche while serving as a glimpse of the future of a publishing industry in flux. Titles like Purple, from France, Fantastic Man from the Netherlands, and Self Service from Paris exploit the overlapping fields of art, architecture and music that fashion has become. They are printed on expensive stock, look like art catalogues, sell at specialised shops across the world for prices beginning at €10, or $13.50, and have a devout following.

(Tzortzis 2007)

Fashion magazines play a central role in circulating fashion. They are instrumental not only in helping readers to make sense of, understand and consume fashion; they are themselves fashionable media that set trends in how fashion is mediated. What I term ‘niche fashion magazines’ are a specific type of fashion magazines, described by Tzortzis above as ‘below the radar of the mainstream’, with a hybridised quality of art, popular culture, high fashion, elite and edge.

Niche fashion magazines are the focal media for the tastemakers of fashion. They are also part of a highly unstable and oversaturated fashion magazine landscape. This landscape is characterised by staff and editor mobility (Jackson et al. 2001), an ebb and flow of titles (Braithwaite and Barrel 1988) and a constant and highly competitive hunt for advertising revenue. Surprisingly, academia has neglected the genre and how fashion is mediated within the alternative fashion press, paying more attention to women’s and men’s magazines and their textual representations of gender.

This book is concerned with contemporary niche fashion magazines and their cultures of production and consumption. The geography of the magazines under scrutiny, and their readers and producers, is Anglo-American and Euro-American.¹ By exploring the cultures of niche fashion magazines, we will understand the relationship between fashion and the press and more particularly how fashion is exchanged and mediated between producers and readers of highly specialised fashion magazines.

Angela McRobbie (1994: 59) observes that there is, throughout cultural studies, a distinction, a binary opposition between ‘text and lived experience’. To overcome this opposition, both are explored through integration of textual analysis, production ethnography and reader interviews. By merging these modes of analysis, meanings of niche fashion magazines within the whole ‘circuit of culture’ (du Gay et al. 2003) of niche fashion magazines are explored, qualified and interrelated. A central aim is therefore to cast light on the meanings of fashion mediation with a specific focus on the methodological integration of textual, consumption and production analysis.

Context

A visit to the specialist bookshop Magma or the Wardour newsstand – or legendary specialist fashion book and magazine shop R. D. Franks which was closed in 2011 – all in central London, overwhelms by the abundance of fashion magazines that mix fashion, art and graphic design. A similar impressive catalogue of specialist fashion magazines is found in some museum bookshops and multi-brand concept shops. Some of the magazines have survived almost twenty years, such as Visionaire (1991), Purple Fashion (1996) and Self Service (1995), and the newer ones that have already reached cult status such as AnOther Magazine (2001), A Magazine (2004), Love (2009) and The Gentlewoman (2010). While all of them have carved out different niches of fashion mediation and pride themselves on being different, independent, creative and alternative, they all belong to the same niche fashion magazine culture.

Since the emergence of the women’s magazine genre in the late seventeenth century (see, for instance, Adburgham 1972; Braithwaite 1995; White 1970), magazines have been powerful channels announcing what is in fashion and shaping readers’ tastes in fashion. Subsequent to fashion dolls and fashion plates, fashion magazines have historically almost single-handedly been responsible for spreading fashion and showing new collections across different types of readerships. However, more recently the emergence of the online fashion press with abundant personal style and fashion blogs – as well as websites such as SHOWstudio.com (established in 2000) and style.com (launched in 2001) – has challenged fashion magazines’ ‘monopoly’ as fashion mediators. In addition, the web is also a cornucopia of personal fashion and style blogs. The online fashion media, both websites and blogs, have two major advantages over fashion magazines: they are constantly updated and they are much cheaper to produce. Blogs are also appreciated for providing a personal and ‘authentic’ space, which acts as an important vehicle in personal ‘identity construction’ (Rocamora 2011), as well as an acceleration of fashion time (Rocamora 2013). As a result of the increased web competition, many magazines now exist online. Dazed’s (formerly Dazed & Confused) digital mouthpiece, Dazed Digital, which was launched in 2006, is an example of magazines’ growing online presence. The abundance of online fashion publishing has led to speculation on the death of the printed fashion press. According to the Economist (27 September 2007), magazine circulation is declining as a result of the internet, as well as the wider recession. Overall, women’s magazine newsstand sales decline, while digital circulations increase (Haughney 2013; Ridley 2013; Stynes 2014). Braithwaite and Barrell (1988) also argue that newspaper supplements and free magazines add competition to the magazine industry. Indeed, fashion magazines across genres are struggling to survive; for instance in May 2009, i-D changed its monthly frequency to bi-monthly in order to survive the ‘current economic climate’ (Brook 2009a) and British Arena had to close in April 2009 (Brook 2009b). In spite of this, new titles keep appearing that are either funded by advertisements or sponsorships or self-funded. The producers’ seemingly indomitable will to launch a new magazine is supported by the belief that ‘start-up magazines are the latest status symbols’, as announced by The Wall Street Journal in 2013 (Vilensky 2013). With regard to their being symbols of status, which I return to later, printed fashion magazines have one advantage over the online fashion press: their tactile quality. The physicality of the magazine, as will be demonstrated, is highly valuable to readers.

Positioned at the forefront of fashion, the innovators of fashion use niche fashion magazines as playgrounds to try out new styles of photography, styling, art direction and models. These producers of fashion are linked via the networks and (sub)cultures of the various niche fashion magazines they work for. It is a prestigious and growing medium, highly influential in how fashion is consumed and produced. The supply, as well as the demise, of niche fashion magazines has grown since the turn of the millennium, yet little knowledge is available as to what they are and how they function in the field of fashion. Although the magazines under study are niche media, they are tightly linked to the wider fashion industry and do not work in isolation from the wider fields of fashion journalism, photography, styling, publishing and clothing trends. Thus, understanding niche fashion magazines also casts light on the way fashion works. The producers of the most successful niche fashion magazines are important tastemakers in that they often also work as consultants and art directors for fashion brands, shaping what is deemed fashionable. For instance, editor-in-chief of Love Magazine, Katie Grand, has also worked as a creative consultant for Louis Vuitton, Marc Jacobs, Loewe and Bottega Veneta. Mathias Augustyniak and Michael Amzalag, who run the art direction and graphic agency M&M, have worked as creative consultants for Vogue Paris, Purple Fashion, Interview Magazine and Arena Homme+, and they have also worked as art directors for the campaigns of Yohji Yamamoto, Balenciaga and Jil Sander and many other fashion companies. These producers are thus responsible for the making of high fashion trends, which later in the fashion cycle often emulate into the wider fashion system. The culture around niche fashion magazines can be said to function as a ‘fashion incubator’ that turns out fashion trends, which affect the wider trends in fashion clothing, styling, photography, beauty ideals, art direction and graphic design. The reach and significance of niche fashion magazines therefore go beyond the magazines and affect the wider field of fashion. By understanding the production, consumption and textual qualities of these magazines, we will recognise the value system that underpins them, which is relevant to an understanding of the wider impetus and stimulus of fashion trends and the field of fashion.

Niche fashion magazine exposure is valuable branding and functions as ‘look books’ of producers and contributors’ work, providing a reference point as well as a working tool for the movers and shakers in the field of fashion. In an increasingly fast-paced fashion industry, the Spanish high street label Zara offers new designs twice a week (Hansen 2012), which are cheap copies of high fashion clothes seen on the catwalk less than four weeks earlier, while the high-fashion label Chanel does more than six annual collections (pre-fall, fall, haute couture, pre-spring, spring/summer and cruise collections). Alongside this speeded up production, internet sites and blogs offering up-to-the-minute news, niche fashion magazines represent a much slower consumption of fashion. While the internet, in the form of fashion blogs in particular, is gaining ground in the field of fashion, this book shows that magazines are highly important to the readers who treasure them as material and symbolic objects. Exploring the materiality of niche fashion magazines is important at a time when digital mediation seems to replace much ‘material’ fashion mediation. With their limited print run, rarer frequency and expensive production, these exclusive magazines represent the haute couture of the fashion press. Their exclusivity is also part of their own raison d’être. For example, the niche fashion magazine 125 sees itself as ‘a gallery-space in print’ (Anon 2014). Their position outside the Internet is also part of the magazines’ own justification. For instance, editor-in-chief Olivier Zahm writes in his editorial note of Purple Fashion:

As an independant [sic] magazine, it has maintained a commitment to artistic individuality, integrity and intelligence. So we also resist the drift towards the Internet, the future home of magazines and practical consumption, in preference for art’s unpredictability and a sense of true fashion design.

(Purple Fashion, issue 4, fall-winter 2005/06: 18)

Besides offering an alternative to the internet, Purple Fashion’s rationale is to not cater to practical consumption.² Instead niche fashion magazine consumption is highly symbolic and it is precisely their symbolic value that sets niche fashion magazines apart from most other genres of fashion magazines.

THE DANISH CASE

DANSK Magazine is a well-established Scandinavian niche fashion magazine with international presence, and since the fieldwork it has gained a much stronger footing internationally. It is significant for its reproduction of the field’s shared values and, like most other niche fashion magazines, its producers also work as creative consultants and important tastemakers in Denmark, and DANSK is thus representative of the production and consumption practices central to the wider niche fashion magazine culture. Yet at the same time DANSK also casts light on a Danish ‘periphery’ fashion hub and its relation to the core fashion cities of London and Paris, as well as their shared cultures and values of fashion publishing.

When used in this context, the notion of field draws directly on Bourdieu’s sociological concept (see, for instance, Bourdieu 1993b). By ‘fields’ he means ‘structured spaces of positions’ (Bourdieu 1993b: 72), which is a social arena where struggles or competition for resources and access take place (Jenkins 1992). There are different fields, such as the field of religion, the field of philosophy and the field of fashion. Key to understanding any field is that within these social spaces there are different rules and laws that organise them: ‘in order for a field to function, there have to be stakes and people prepared to play the game, endowed with a habitus that implies knowledge and recognition of the imminent laws of the field, the stakes, and so on’ (Bourdieu, 1993b: 72). So a field is a social arena in which the ‘players’ accept and understand the game. In drawing on Bourdieuian theory, Agnès Rocamora (2009: 28) offers a useful definition of a field, as ‘a semi-autonomous structured space of positions defined by specific rules of functioning, values and principles, and the existence of consecrated institutions involved in the promulgating and legitimating ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Author Bio
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 FASHION MAGAZINES BELOW THE RADAR
• 2 BETWEEN EDGE AND ELITE: Niche Fashion Magazines
• 3 CONTEMPORARY NICHE FASHION MAGAZINES
• 4 THE CASE Of DANSK MAGAZINE
• 5 ‘IT’S NEVER GOOD ENOUGH’: Cultures of Niche Fashion Magazine Production and Fashion Capital
• 6 ‘PREACHING TO THE ALREADY CONVERTED’: Readers, Consumption of Exclusivity and Reproduction of the Codes
• 7 ‘AN EXTENSION OF YOURSELF’: Magazine Possessions, Social Distinction and Consumption as Production
• 8 THE FUTURE OF NICHE FASHION MAGAZINES
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography