‘Magazines must probe, analyze, and offer background material. They must provide a broader perspective, they must synthesize and define complex issues. A magazine today must stand for something or it represents nothing’ (Ferber, 1979, p.44).
Credit: Jenny Lelkes.
September’s Special Collections display in LCF Library focuses on our collection of fashion magazines, displaying historical titles alongside a variety of contemporary titles. Although often read as leisure items, fashion magazines are also rich sources for academic study.
A magazine can be defined as a publication, containing articles and illustrations, on a particular subject or aimed at a particular demographic. Although ubiquitous within physical and digital spaces within society, the academic discourse surrounding the magazine, regardless of its genre, has often disregarded it in privileged more well-studied commodities such as the newspaper or the film (Holmes, 2008). When the magazine has been subject of academic study, the focus has often been too narrowly defined in terms of subjects or publications covered (such as the presentation of strict gender identities in women’s and men’s magazines) (Holmes, 2008).
As readers and researchers alike, we need to understand that engaging with a magazine is an extremely visceral and embodied experience regardless of the platform they are presented on. They help their reader to comprehend their surroundings and events that are happening both in their lives and at a much larger socio-political and economic level. Reading a magazine is an immersive experience that requires “the reader to sit down, read, and reflect…to pay close attention…[and] become more thoughtful and critical’ (Johnson, 2008, p. 2) about what is presented to them.
Magazines, therefore, can be studied from any angle: they can be instructional or factual, but equally they can be “shapers, reflectors, cultural crucibles, agenda setters, power brokers, historical entities, community builders, framers, feminist manifestos, economic commodities, advocates, [and] post-modern documents” (Johnson, 2008, p.3).
What is clear is that the fashion magazine offers the researcher a multifaceted and often trans-disciplinary arena for studying fashion. The London College of Fashion Library Special Collections contains a plethora of fashion magazines ranging from:
- 19th century trade publications such as Tailor and Cutter and Sartorial Gazette.
- Early 20th century French fashion magazines such as Mabs Fashion.
- High-end curated fashion magazines that blur the lines between art and magazine such as Six and Visionaire.
For the designer, trend forecaster, fashion buyer or advertiser, historian and curator (to name but a few), these magazines are a microcosm of the fashion industry, continually referencing the past to influence the future and creating new narratives that influence our understanding of fashion.
For example, both the fashion illustration and fashion photography contained within fashion magazines go far beyond their primary objective to document. Whilst the former could be interpreted as a direct reflector and influencer on the dominant artistic trends and movements of a particular time and place in history such as in L. Abraham et Cie. Soiries and Plaire; Hartley (2008) argues that fashion photography is the last bastion of photojournalism and images within fashion magazines such as V magazine and Elle. These latter titles create new national and gendered identities that are disseminated to an international audience.
If you would like to find out more about these and the other fashion magazines in LCF Library Special Collections, please do come and pay us a visit.
Jenny Lelkes.
LCF Special Collections.
References:
Ferber, S., (1979), ‘Magazines: the medium of enlightenment’, USA Today, July, p. 44.
Hartley, J., (2008), ‘Documenting Kate Moss: fashion photography and the persistence of photojournalism’, in: Holmes, T., (ed.), (2008), Mapping the magazine: comparative studies in magazine journalism, London: Routledge, pp. 34-44.
Holmes, T., (2008), ‘Mapping the magazine: an introduction’, in: Holmes, T., (ed.), (2008), Mapping the magazine: comparative studies in magazine journalism, London: Routledge, pp. viii-xix.
Johnson, S., (2008), ‘Why should they care? The relationship of academic scholarship to the magazine industry’, Holmes, T., (ed.), (2008), Mapping the magazine: comparative studies in magazine journalism, London: Routledge, pp. 1-7.