Fashion diffusion and the role of media
First of all, I want to make a clarification that fashion and clothing are two different concepts. By fashion, in my study, I don’t mean the visual clothing but the prevailing use of dress adopted in society for a specific time.
Fashion has been with us since humans started to clothe themselves. Back in the late 16th century and the early 17thcentury, fashion was an indicator of class status, and practically monopolized by the aristocracy. However, in the meantime, as lower-status groups sought to acquire status by adopting the clothing of the higher-status, fashion became interesting to a larger number of people.
Fashion plates, as you can see here, can be considered the first medium that disseminating fashion information. They were originally a way of illustrating current dress styles for wealthy individuals, dressmakers, and merchants. The first known fashion plates began circulating at the French Court in the 17th century.
At the beginning, the plates were engraved and hand colored with watercolors until the 1880s when color printing and a method for making multi-color prints became stylish.
At the same period of time, the French publication Mercure Galant was founded. This publication is regarded as the first fashion magazine, and it was a significant development in the history of journalism and played an important role in the dissemination of news about fashion.
Fashion plates were popular until the 1920s when photography became the norm for fashion reporting. With the development of the half-tone printing process, which enables photographs to be printed on the same page as text without affecting image clarity, fashion photograph has generated the most widely recognizable and enduring imagery of our time.
Vogue, for example, one of the major fashion publications worldwide began using photographs to show fashion towards the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, and not surprisingly, this method of disseminating fashion information lasts until today.
Fashion television emerged in the 1970s and 1980s when cable and satellite broadcasting was booming. The mass adoption of television soon became an important source of visual persuasion in fashion communications.
Fashion television has revolutionized the dissemination of fashion information to a mass audience; and it has become a major communication vehicle.
Most fashion TV programs covered designer collections across the world, profiling designers and models, and the seasonal trends. Also, celebrities, movie stars, popular music stars started to become the opinion leaders in fashion worlds, along with editors of leading fashion magazines or TV shows.
Indeed, it’s hard to overestimate the importance of magazines and television to the fashion system, however, these media are still regarded as traditional influencers that followed a top-down process of developing and pushing controlled messages to the audience.
The internet has allowed for the democratization if fashion. Fashion bloggers, for example, are one of the most important new influencers in the diffusion of fashion because they have removed the gatekeeper of an industry that used to be hard to penetrate, and provide competition for traditional fashion magazines.
What you are seeing now in this slide is Live Twitter feeds that displayed on screens at the American Express sponsored area, during Fashion Week in New York earlier this year
In the current media landscape of social media, previously inaccessible shows and designers are being brought down to online earth by Twitter, Facebook, online streaming and blogs, allowing ordinary people a glimpse of what previously only the fashion opinion leaders were allowed to see
The technology—tweeting, blogging, social media, etc.—has affected different aspects of fashion tremendously; from commentary to fashion design, communication, and distribution. In the future, the digital media would continue to reveal new creative fields within global access, and multimedia features. While in the magazines’ world, trends are dictated from above by a select group of editors, the internet suggests every person’s entitlement to an opinion.
Fashion magazines are not doomed.
First of all, the websites of the magazines will have to move away from the “blog” format and create an inspiring, tight template for their photo productions or editorial content, a website that has the same feeling of luxury and glamour as flipping through a glossy magazine.
Secondly, as editors of an offline and online entity with the publication, magazines would be reducing barriers and integrating the offline and online entities of themselves even further.
Lastly, fashion is a tactile experience. Magazines matter because paper stock matters. Photography matters. And image quality matters. Glossy magazines deliver an experience that a webpage doesn’t.
But magazines could learn a few lessons from the online space that might offer advertisers added value while enriching the experience for consumers at the same time.
Reference
Shirky, C. (2008, July 24). Clay Shirky – Future Transformations. Retrieved March 9, 2010, from Us Now:http://usnowfilm.com/logs/15
Evolving Influence 