Abstract
This chapter is about the role of women’s fashion magazines in creating and sustaining the fashion industry as a magical network, primarily through naming practices. Those working for fashion magazines are specialists and experts in a particular branch of magic which makes use of glamour, enchantment, and illusion to form “a community of faith” in the power of “style.” The rhetoric of fashion magazines creates a seamless web of magical names from different political, economic, and cultural realms, through a masterful language of illusion. These names (of designers, celebrities, fashion houses, models, photographers, etc.) are like magical modes of thought in that they form an implicitly coherent system of seemingly magical connections between genres, styles, materials, texts, and culture, on the one hand, and advertising, brands, and the economy, on the other. They can thus be said to form a name economy.
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- 1.
The material in this chapter is based on 15 years of on-and-off fieldwork among magazine editors and publishers in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and London, as well as on content analysis of more than 650 issues of 4 international fashion magazines: Vogue, Elle, Marie Claire, and Harper’s Bazaar. For a more detailed analysis, see Moeran (2015).
- 2.
The ways in which clothes and materials are described in fashion magazines (sexy silk, frivolous chiffon, soft knits, etc.) echo Evans-Pritchard’s discussion of magic among the Azande, for whom “material substance…is the occult and essential element in a rite, for in the substance lies the mystical power which produces the desired end” (1937: 441). Fashion magazines, like Zande magicians , address their materials and then the object that they wish to influence (ibid. p. 450): Gleaming gilded leather, sparky sequins, and lashings of Lurex add film-star glamour to this summer’s wardrobe.
- 3.
They also rely on trend forecasters, whose work focuses on future sociocultural events, “ethnographic” observations of major urban environments, and a healthy dose of “performative utterances” intended to convince those in the industry. Their work is also in some sense magical, as they design, rather than predict, trends (Interview, Wessie Ling, fashion forecaster, Paris, February 11, 2003; see also Hoskins 2014: 45–49).
- 4.
Weber (1978: 401) defines an “orgy” as a “primordial form of religious association.”
- 5.
As Tansy Hoskins (2014: 10) notes: “It is everything that goes around clothes that makes them fashion.”
- 6.
More recently, Delphine Dion and Eric Arnould (2011) have argued that luxury retail strategy in the fashion world relies on art and magic to create brand charisma . See their contribution to this book. Many of the words cited here, like glamour, owe their etymological origins to forms of magic . Pretty, for example, once meant “cunning, skilful, and artful,” and is derived from prættig meaning trick or wile; fascinate meant to bewitch, or enchant (from Latin, fascinum, meaning spell or witchcraft ); allure to attract, tempt, or captivate, primarily through “a gait, way of walking”; and charm referred to a magical incantation or spell (Oxford Dictionary of English).
- 7.
Fashion magazines make use of both illocutionary (a different kind of cool) and perlocutionary (grey suddenly looks newly fresh and chic) acts. The former are designed to “secure uptake” on the part of their readers and the fashion world, thereby taking effect and inviting a response (Austin 1962: 117–118; low-key cool) which leads into the next fashion “season” with its collections (a dark sense of cool), and so on (colour—strong colour—is now cool) ad infinitum.
- 8.
Fashion magazines publish fashion photographs in order to achieve through non-locutionary means the response (or sequel) invited by their perlocutionary acts (Austin 1962: 119).
- 9.
See http://www.bartleby.com/196/5.html, http://www.bartleby.com/196/6.html, and http://www.bartleby.com/196/7.html for relevant discussion.
- 10.
As with the kula , there is a hierarchy of fame at work here, from unknown designers whose dresses circulate in material form only, to those who can attach their individual names to material designs (Organza dress, £4500, Christopher Kane). Some names are indissolubly linked to the fashion houses for which they work (Nicolas Ghesquière’s debut collection for Louis Vuitton); others are free-floating, because they have established their own fashion houses with their own names (Joan in Tom Ford twisted wool coat and velvet dress). Here material items circulate in generic verbal form (Hilary Swank in Michael Kors). A designer’s ultimate aim, and accolade, is to make an item of clothing that is itself named (the Berardi glass corset, the Monroe dress, the Birkin bag, etc.) and talked about throughout the fashion and film worlds.
- 11.
Clothing items are multifunctional when it comes to what they can do for different parts of a woman’s body. Marie Claire USA (February 2001) advises its reader that a blouson jacket conceals a small bust; long jackets disguise a big butt; vertical lines flatter all silhouettes. With the latest lingerie, you can slenderize your body, firm up your thighs, downplay curves, flatten stomach bulges, create cleavage, and disguise your flaws. Trenchant advice for those in the trenches.
- 12.
Angela McRobbie argues that fashion pages in fashion magazines do not have to sell the clothes depicted, even though they list stockists, talk about designers and retailers, and report on the new collections (1998: 163 [Kindle version]). Nevertheless, in the longer term such images are presumed to contribute, if but indirectly, to sales.
- 13.
As Bourdieu (1993: 138) acidly points out: “if you’re a fashion journalist, it is not advisable to have a sociological view of the world.”
- 14.
“To make oneself known, it is a good idea to have a name, or, for products, a brand name” (Boltanski and Thévénot 2006: 180).
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Moeran, B. (2018). Magical Names: Glamour, Enchantment, and Illusion in Women’s Fashion Magazines. In: Moeran, B., de Waal Malefyt, T. (eds) Magical Capitalism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74397-4_6
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