More Than Just a Fashion Magazine

Abstract

This article makes use of Becker's analysis of art worlds as ‘networks of people cooperating’ to examine the ongoing relationships negotiated between fashion magazine staff, their readers, advertisers and the fashion world that fashion magazines represent. It focuses on two structural issues that affect the relation between culture and economy: namely, fashion magazines are both cultural products and commodities; and magazine production is characterized by a ‘multiple audience’ property, which includes readers, advertisers and the fashion world itself. These enable magazines to link cultural production to the reception of fashion – on the one hand, helping form a collective concept of what ‘fashion’ is and, on the other, transforming fashion as an abstract idea and aesthetic discourse into everyday dress. This ‘aesthetic’, however, is not unified, so the article argues for a more nuanced analysis of cultural production in terms of the different values (technical, appreciative, social and use) brought to bear by consumers as they convert symbolic into commodity exchange.