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El estilo entre líneas: una historia del periodismo de moda
The History of Fashion Journalism is a uniquely comprehensive study of the development of the industry from its origins to the present day and professionals', such as Anna Wintour, vision of the future. Covering everything from early tailor's catalogues through to contemporary publications such as LOVE, together with blogs like The Sartorialist and handbag.com, and countries from Russia through to The United States, The History of Fashion Journalism explores the origins and influence of such well-known magazines as Nova, Vogue and Glamour.
Combining an overview of the key moments in fashion journalism history with close textual analysis, Kate Nelson Best brings to life the evolving face of the fashion media and its relationship with the fashion industry, gender and national politics and consumer culture. This accessible and highly engaging book will be an invaluable resource not only for Fashion Studies students but also for those in Media Studies, Cultural Studies and Gender Studies.
Combining an overview of the key moments in fashion journalism history with close textual analysis, Kate Nelson Best brings to life the evolving face of the fashion media and its relationship with the fashion industry, gender and national politics and consumer culture. This accessible and highly engaging book will be an invaluable resource not only for Fashion Studies students but also for those in Media Studies, Cultural Studies and Gender Studies.
350 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2019
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August 22, 2019
2 – A Symbiotic Relationship: The Origins of the Modern Fashion Press
p.15 – The fortunes of the fashion industry and fashion journalism have been inextricably linked since the seventeenth century, when France and its court assumed fashion leadership among the Western aristocracy as part of Louis XIV’s wider pretentions to cultural domination.
During the eighteenth century, the appetite for fashion grew as the increasingly urbanized and expanding middle class sought to create an identity distinct from court dominance. As the fashion industry developed to meet this demand, the fist magazine devoted to fashion, La Cabinet des Modes, appeared in France in 1785. It was imitated in Britain, Germany, and Italy.
By the mid-nineteenth century French women’s fashion mesmerized the Western world. The active promotion of the French fashion industry at the Great Exhibitions in London and Paris – France was the only country to exhibit women’s ready-made clothes in 1852, 1855, and 1867 – and the status of Paris as the apotheosis of fashionable culture created a desire for French fashion across Europe and America.
p.16 – The first edition of Harper’s Bazaar in America in 1867 boasted that its fashion news was as up-to-date as that of Paris.
By 1860 France was Europe’s leading industrial power thanks to fashion and its ancillary industries, and the economic, political, and cultural importance of the fashion industry meant that the French dominated the fashion media until the last quarter of the century. […] The expansion of the fashion press was linked to the growth of the French fashion industry itself, which industrialized rapidly.
The development if the fashion industry expanded the market and created advertising support for the fashion press.
p.21 – Les Cabinets des Modes (1785-93) was the first regular magazine devoted entirely to fashion. The brainchild of editor jean Antoine Brun (also known as LeBrun Tossa) and the publisher Bosse, Le Cabinet was published every fifteen days, ran to eight pages, and contained three plates at a cost of 21 livres. Its first edition announced its intention to describe clearly and precisely all the clothing and new adornments of both sexes in order to give “an exact and timely knowledge” (Preface, Oct. 15, 1785).
p.23 – In 1789 the French Revolution disrupted Paris’ pre-eminence as a fashion center. This allowed other countries to venture into fashion publishing, creating new networks for the circulation of fashion in London, Germany (Weimar), and Austria (Breward 2003: 118). In addition, the Revolution sparked a wave of emigration that, together with Louis’ earlier expulsion of the Protestant Hugenots, spread French skills across the West.
Germany’s first fashion magazine, Journal des Luxus und der Moden (1786-1827 [1808]) was modeled on Le Cabinet and was rushed into print by Friedrich Justin Bertuch to stop the French magazine gaining a foothold in Germany (Purdy 1998: 8-9).
p.40 – Not only did French department stores start to produce their own magazines, but much growth also came from outside France. The French were distracted by the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), once more allowing the development of the fashion press in other centers. Germany was unified in 1871 and its emerging ready-made clothing industry needed press support, including Vienna-based Die Modenwelt (1865-1911), which was translated into fourteen languages and exported as far afield as South America, and the long-running Berlin-based Brigitte (1886-), originally titled Dies Blatt Gehört der Hausfrau (This Paper Belongs to the Housewife).
p.41 – 1867 US launch of Harper’s Bazar (it changed its name to Bazaar in November 1929) and Arthur Baldwin Turnure’s 1892 launch of Vogue as a weekly.
p.42 – Vogue’s first issue appeared in New York on Dec. 17, 1892, also priced at 10 cents. Like Bazar, it explained its own title – tellingly borrowed from the French – “as a particular style of dress was then in vogue.” Highly Eurocentric, its creator Arthur Turnure was a wealthy Manhattanite who mixed with and got investment for Vogue from the city’s aristocracy.
Vogue’s illustrated covers were often by recognized artists, and from around 1900 were frequently in color. Its female editor, Josephine Redding, adopted an authoritarian stance on dress and etiquette. By 1909, when Condé Montrose Nast purchased the magazine, Vogue had a weekly circulation of 14,000 copies and an annual revenue of $100,000.
3 – La Parisienne: Early Fashionable Icons
p.47 – The earliest icons of the fashionable world were part of the closed elite of the European courts, particularly in France. Even after the French Revolution, the focus of early fashion journals such as Journal des Dames et des Modes was still very much on elites. Magazines in the 1830s and 1840s continued to focus on this closed aristocratic group, recognizing clothes as fashionable when they were adopted by “the best society” (Greimas 2000: 11).
Individuals with aristocratic connections, such as Beau Brummel and Lord Byron in Britain (Brummen being an intimate of the Prince of Wales), and later Le Comte D”Orsay in France, emerged as icons of dandyism.
p.54 – A new discriminator emerged in the term “chic,” which was included in eight titles launched between 1883 and 1908. This notion was as nebulous as that of “distinction” – or indeed “taste” – but as Lisa Tiersten notes: “fashion magazines emphasized the notion that chic was an aesthetic expression of the private individual that had little to do with money or rank” (2001: 102).
p.55 – The chic of La Parisienne now came from taste and discernment in all forms of fashionable consumption, including culture. […] La Parisienne was more than fashion’s muse, she creates her own fashionable style.
p.64 – The “New Woman” was linked to increasing political demands for female emancipation during the latter part of the century: while 1889 was the year of another Exposition Universelle, for example (it showcased the Eiffel Tower), it was also the year of women’s congress in Paris, Congrés des Femmes. […] Some magazines became enthusiastic supporters of calls for political freedom.
Dress reform took hold more strongly in America and Britain. In 1851 feminists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Amelia Bloomer started their campaign against fashionable dress and its perceived repression of women by adopting a costume of short dresses worn over baggy trousers or “bloomers.”
p.66 – Perhaps the magazine that most directly addressed the “New Woman” was Oscar Wilde’s The Woman’s World. Wilde was no stranger to the world of fashion or fashion journalism. He had lectured on “dress” in the early 1880s, both at home and in the U.S., linking art with cosmetics, fashion, and home decoration.
4 – Patriotism and Couture: Fashion Journalism Between the Wars
p.78 – In Germany, French terms were eliminated from the fashion discourse from July 1914 and magazines coined German replacements: konfektion for the French confection (ready-to-wear).
By February 1916 there was a ban on luxury clothing and foreign cosmetics and perfumes. Various trade associations were formed to promote German design through the fashion press, and the first Mode Woche of German fashion shows in Berlin in August 1918 received extensive coverage.
p.83 – In 1926, Nast outlined “Vogue’s desire to promote all that was new in art” as long as it had “the intangible quality of chic” and British Vogue produced a “Primer of Art” in July 1938.
Not to be outdone, in January 1915 Harper’s Bazaar hired the Russian emigré Erté (Romain de Tirtoff), who had trained as a designer under Poiret, to create its covers.
The overlapping of couture and art continued during the 1930s with the links between the Surrealist movement and designers such as Schiaparelli.
p.86 – As part of Chanel’s entourage, both Colette and Cocteau wrote regularly for fashion magazines. Colette contributed to French Vogue from 1922 until 1926, including reviews and commentaries on catwalk presentations. She later wrote for Harper’s Bazaar, contributing articles from occupied Paris, “Paris From My Window.”
p.90 – Condé Nast’s advertising background led to his innovative focus on an elite audience in order to gain advertising from luxury brands. Nast acquired Vogue in 1909.
p.91 – Vogue’s position as fashion arbiter extended beyond the elite. By the 1930s it already functioned as a trade journal and Macy’s bought 100 copies a month for its employees.
p.92 – Early photographic pioneers nurtured by Nast included Man Ray, Baron Adolphe de Meyer, Edward Steichen, Beaton, and George Hoyningen-Heuné.
p.93 – Harper’s Bazaar was acquired by William Randolph Hearst in 1913 and added an extra “a” to its name in 1929. Hearst was a newspaper publisher but saw the commercial possibilities of an elite fashion publication. In 1929 he launched a British edition of the magazine.
During the early years of the Depression (1929-33) couture sales faltered and fashion magazines, including Vogue, were badly affected by loss of advertising revenue. Nast lost his personal fortune on the stock market and the company was taken over in 1933 by Blue Ridge Investments. Some magazines folded […] for others, paradoxically, readership grew: Harper’s Bazaar doubled its circulation between 1930 and 1940. Fashion magazine, arguably, offered a diversion from economic woes, as epitomized by the new fashion editor Diana Vreeland’s whimsical fantasies in her “Why Don’t You” column in Harper’s Bazaar.
p.94 – While Hollywood was particularly influential in disseminating mass-market fashion, elite magazines soon capitalized on its popularity. Fashion editorials focused on which stars couturiers dressed, and photographs featured the stars in couture.
Recognizing the growing influence of the movies, in 1932 Condé Nast launched the mass-market Hollywood Patterns to capitalize on consumer demand for fashion and beauty information about the stars, and to support his ailing Vogue Patterns business.
5 – Democratization: Post-War Segmentation in Fashion Magazines
p.105 – If World War I produced a new fashion landscape in which Paris was increasingly threatened by other clothing centers, the growing dominance of American publishers in fashion publishing had a equally significant impact.
p.108 – The new magazines were aimed at the ever-increasing middle class, who were becoming not only better-off but also increasingly literate and well educated.
Much of working women’s newfound wealth was spent on clothing. Expenditure on personal clothing more than doubled in the U.S. between 1940 and 1950, although clothes prices were falling, and by 1949 fashion was the second most important retail sector, beaten only by food. Meanwhile, technological advances in clothing manufacture and the wartime development of a wide range of synthetic fabrics increased the availability of affordable clothing and created important advertising opportunities for magazines.
6 – The Golden Age: Fashion Journalism and Haute Couture in the 1950s
p.133 – Paris haute couture reasserted itself at the summit of fashion immediately after the war, a period widely recognized as a golden age in which fashion journalism was again instrumental in promoting couture. As Carmel Snow attests, journalists assumed a greater authority and critical function and this was, therefore, a golden age for fashion journalism too, especially in New York.
p.140 – Dior’s “New Look” made fashion, and more particularly hemlines, news. Dior continued to chance the “line” – a key word in the fashion journalist’s lexicon – creating new names for each (the “Ovale,” the “Tulip”) and thus giving journalists ready-made headlines. The Maison Dior also provided press packs that included official photos and advice on styling. Dior was, in turn, rewarded with extensive press coverage.
Dior opened a New York branch in 1948 and launched a special collection of ready-to-wear for the U.S. market and later bonded copies and patterns. There was also plenty of copying on Seventh Avenue, bringing couture design to the mass market.
p.147 – As fashion became news, fashion journalism came of age. The impact of Dior and “The New Look” turned designers into household names, while the New York schedules also helped former amateurs become professional reporters. […] Journalists were expected to be extremely knowledgeable.
p.148 – The fashion journalist was expected to be able to distill the message from the couturiers, pronounce on the significant trends, and make judgments on key looks for both readers and buyers.
7 – The Rise of Individualism: The 1960s and 1970s
p.160 – A new icon of femininity emerged: the single girl who was financially, and by implication, sexually independent. Fashion photography both created and reflected her changing status and freedom: shots became much more active and the same girl jumped, ran, and looked real.
A new type of designer clothing emerged in Paris and elsewhere: prêt-à-porter. Yves Saint Laurent launched Rive Gauche in 1966, the first stand-alone ready-to-wear label from a couturier with its own boutique.
p.162 – Meanwhile, in the U.S. the feminist movement became increasingly vocal. One of its cornerstones, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), had been highly critical of the role of women’s magazines in promoting limiting definitions of femininity.
Overall, a new type of fashion – and of fashion writing – emerged during the 1970s that was centered on self-styling. Enabling rather than dictatorial, it was based on the touchstone ideas of “freedom” and “choice.” A subcultural influence bubbled up, the street began to feature in fashion editorial. […] Bill Cunningham inaugurated his street fashion shots for the New York Times in 1978. Individualism emerged as a key cultural signifier, as epitomized by Condé Nast’s 1979 launch of Self.
p.181 – The fashion press has been targeting male readers since the early 1960s, but men’s new importance was largely the result of the link between music and fashion in popular culture. Heralded by the 1950s Beatniks in America and the Teddy Boy, a new dandy – “the Mod” – was born in Britain. New shops and designers supplied menswear. Paco Rabanne had started menswear in 1959. […] The hedonistic “playboy” aesthetic, which had developed in America in the 1950s, became widespread.
p.183 – In the 1970s, the rise of the Gay Rights movement provided a new impetus to the fashion-conscious male. Expenditure on male clothing rose, as reflected in L’Uomo Vogue. Originally launched in 1968 as a biannual trade magazine to support the burgeoning Italian menswear industry; it became a monthly in 1975.
p.186 – Influenced by Cosmopolitan, other fashion magazines started to focus on fashion as empowerment. Nowhere was the shift from the 1960s optimism and fashion fantasy to 1970s realism and the demands of the “working woman” more apparent than at American Vogue under the editorship
p.15 – The fortunes of the fashion industry and fashion journalism have been inextricably linked since the seventeenth century, when France and its court assumed fashion leadership among the Western aristocracy as part of Louis XIV’s wider pretentions to cultural domination.
During the eighteenth century, the appetite for fashion grew as the increasingly urbanized and expanding middle class sought to create an identity distinct from court dominance. As the fashion industry developed to meet this demand, the fist magazine devoted to fashion, La Cabinet des Modes, appeared in France in 1785. It was imitated in Britain, Germany, and Italy.
By the mid-nineteenth century French women’s fashion mesmerized the Western world. The active promotion of the French fashion industry at the Great Exhibitions in London and Paris – France was the only country to exhibit women’s ready-made clothes in 1852, 1855, and 1867 – and the status of Paris as the apotheosis of fashionable culture created a desire for French fashion across Europe and America.
p.16 – The first edition of Harper’s Bazaar in America in 1867 boasted that its fashion news was as up-to-date as that of Paris.
By 1860 France was Europe’s leading industrial power thanks to fashion and its ancillary industries, and the economic, political, and cultural importance of the fashion industry meant that the French dominated the fashion media until the last quarter of the century. […] The expansion of the fashion press was linked to the growth of the French fashion industry itself, which industrialized rapidly.
The development if the fashion industry expanded the market and created advertising support for the fashion press.
p.21 – Les Cabinets des Modes (1785-93) was the first regular magazine devoted entirely to fashion. The brainchild of editor jean Antoine Brun (also known as LeBrun Tossa) and the publisher Bosse, Le Cabinet was published every fifteen days, ran to eight pages, and contained three plates at a cost of 21 livres. Its first edition announced its intention to describe clearly and precisely all the clothing and new adornments of both sexes in order to give “an exact and timely knowledge” (Preface, Oct. 15, 1785).
p.23 – In 1789 the French Revolution disrupted Paris’ pre-eminence as a fashion center. This allowed other countries to venture into fashion publishing, creating new networks for the circulation of fashion in London, Germany (Weimar), and Austria (Breward 2003: 118). In addition, the Revolution sparked a wave of emigration that, together with Louis’ earlier expulsion of the Protestant Hugenots, spread French skills across the West.
Germany’s first fashion magazine, Journal des Luxus und der Moden (1786-1827 [1808]) was modeled on Le Cabinet and was rushed into print by Friedrich Justin Bertuch to stop the French magazine gaining a foothold in Germany (Purdy 1998: 8-9).
p.40 – Not only did French department stores start to produce their own magazines, but much growth also came from outside France. The French were distracted by the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), once more allowing the development of the fashion press in other centers. Germany was unified in 1871 and its emerging ready-made clothing industry needed press support, including Vienna-based Die Modenwelt (1865-1911), which was translated into fourteen languages and exported as far afield as South America, and the long-running Berlin-based Brigitte (1886-), originally titled Dies Blatt Gehört der Hausfrau (This Paper Belongs to the Housewife).
p.41 – 1867 US launch of Harper’s Bazar (it changed its name to Bazaar in November 1929) and Arthur Baldwin Turnure’s 1892 launch of Vogue as a weekly.
p.42 – Vogue’s first issue appeared in New York on Dec. 17, 1892, also priced at 10 cents. Like Bazar, it explained its own title – tellingly borrowed from the French – “as a particular style of dress was then in vogue.” Highly Eurocentric, its creator Arthur Turnure was a wealthy Manhattanite who mixed with and got investment for Vogue from the city’s aristocracy.
Vogue’s illustrated covers were often by recognized artists, and from around 1900 were frequently in color. Its female editor, Josephine Redding, adopted an authoritarian stance on dress and etiquette. By 1909, when Condé Montrose Nast purchased the magazine, Vogue had a weekly circulation of 14,000 copies and an annual revenue of $100,000.
3 – La Parisienne: Early Fashionable Icons
p.47 – The earliest icons of the fashionable world were part of the closed elite of the European courts, particularly in France. Even after the French Revolution, the focus of early fashion journals such as Journal des Dames et des Modes was still very much on elites. Magazines in the 1830s and 1840s continued to focus on this closed aristocratic group, recognizing clothes as fashionable when they were adopted by “the best society” (Greimas 2000: 11).
Individuals with aristocratic connections, such as Beau Brummel and Lord Byron in Britain (Brummen being an intimate of the Prince of Wales), and later Le Comte D”Orsay in France, emerged as icons of dandyism.
p.54 – A new discriminator emerged in the term “chic,” which was included in eight titles launched between 1883 and 1908. This notion was as nebulous as that of “distinction” – or indeed “taste” – but as Lisa Tiersten notes: “fashion magazines emphasized the notion that chic was an aesthetic expression of the private individual that had little to do with money or rank” (2001: 102).
p.55 – The chic of La Parisienne now came from taste and discernment in all forms of fashionable consumption, including culture. […] La Parisienne was more than fashion’s muse, she creates her own fashionable style.
p.64 – The “New Woman” was linked to increasing political demands for female emancipation during the latter part of the century: while 1889 was the year of another Exposition Universelle, for example (it showcased the Eiffel Tower), it was also the year of women’s congress in Paris, Congrés des Femmes. […] Some magazines became enthusiastic supporters of calls for political freedom.
Dress reform took hold more strongly in America and Britain. In 1851 feminists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Amelia Bloomer started their campaign against fashionable dress and its perceived repression of women by adopting a costume of short dresses worn over baggy trousers or “bloomers.”
p.66 – Perhaps the magazine that most directly addressed the “New Woman” was Oscar Wilde’s The Woman’s World. Wilde was no stranger to the world of fashion or fashion journalism. He had lectured on “dress” in the early 1880s, both at home and in the U.S., linking art with cosmetics, fashion, and home decoration.
4 – Patriotism and Couture: Fashion Journalism Between the Wars
p.78 – In Germany, French terms were eliminated from the fashion discourse from July 1914 and magazines coined German replacements: konfektion for the French confection (ready-to-wear).
By February 1916 there was a ban on luxury clothing and foreign cosmetics and perfumes. Various trade associations were formed to promote German design through the fashion press, and the first Mode Woche of German fashion shows in Berlin in August 1918 received extensive coverage.
p.83 – In 1926, Nast outlined “Vogue’s desire to promote all that was new in art” as long as it had “the intangible quality of chic” and British Vogue produced a “Primer of Art” in July 1938.
Not to be outdone, in January 1915 Harper’s Bazaar hired the Russian emigré Erté (Romain de Tirtoff), who had trained as a designer under Poiret, to create its covers.
The overlapping of couture and art continued during the 1930s with the links between the Surrealist movement and designers such as Schiaparelli.
p.86 – As part of Chanel’s entourage, both Colette and Cocteau wrote regularly for fashion magazines. Colette contributed to French Vogue from 1922 until 1926, including reviews and commentaries on catwalk presentations. She later wrote for Harper’s Bazaar, contributing articles from occupied Paris, “Paris From My Window.”
p.90 – Condé Nast’s advertising background led to his innovative focus on an elite audience in order to gain advertising from luxury brands. Nast acquired Vogue in 1909.
p.91 – Vogue’s position as fashion arbiter extended beyond the elite. By the 1930s it already functioned as a trade journal and Macy’s bought 100 copies a month for its employees.
p.92 – Early photographic pioneers nurtured by Nast included Man Ray, Baron Adolphe de Meyer, Edward Steichen, Beaton, and George Hoyningen-Heuné.
p.93 – Harper’s Bazaar was acquired by William Randolph Hearst in 1913 and added an extra “a” to its name in 1929. Hearst was a newspaper publisher but saw the commercial possibilities of an elite fashion publication. In 1929 he launched a British edition of the magazine.
During the early years of the Depression (1929-33) couture sales faltered and fashion magazines, including Vogue, were badly affected by loss of advertising revenue. Nast lost his personal fortune on the stock market and the company was taken over in 1933 by Blue Ridge Investments. Some magazines folded […] for others, paradoxically, readership grew: Harper’s Bazaar doubled its circulation between 1930 and 1940. Fashion magazine, arguably, offered a diversion from economic woes, as epitomized by the new fashion editor Diana Vreeland’s whimsical fantasies in her “Why Don’t You” column in Harper’s Bazaar.
p.94 – While Hollywood was particularly influential in disseminating mass-market fashion, elite magazines soon capitalized on its popularity. Fashion editorials focused on which stars couturiers dressed, and photographs featured the stars in couture.
Recognizing the growing influence of the movies, in 1932 Condé Nast launched the mass-market Hollywood Patterns to capitalize on consumer demand for fashion and beauty information about the stars, and to support his ailing Vogue Patterns business.
5 – Democratization: Post-War Segmentation in Fashion Magazines
p.105 – If World War I produced a new fashion landscape in which Paris was increasingly threatened by other clothing centers, the growing dominance of American publishers in fashion publishing had a equally significant impact.
p.108 – The new magazines were aimed at the ever-increasing middle class, who were becoming not only better-off but also increasingly literate and well educated.
Much of working women’s newfound wealth was spent on clothing. Expenditure on personal clothing more than doubled in the U.S. between 1940 and 1950, although clothes prices were falling, and by 1949 fashion was the second most important retail sector, beaten only by food. Meanwhile, technological advances in clothing manufacture and the wartime development of a wide range of synthetic fabrics increased the availability of affordable clothing and created important advertising opportunities for magazines.
6 – The Golden Age: Fashion Journalism and Haute Couture in the 1950s
p.133 – Paris haute couture reasserted itself at the summit of fashion immediately after the war, a period widely recognized as a golden age in which fashion journalism was again instrumental in promoting couture. As Carmel Snow attests, journalists assumed a greater authority and critical function and this was, therefore, a golden age for fashion journalism too, especially in New York.
p.140 – Dior’s “New Look” made fashion, and more particularly hemlines, news. Dior continued to chance the “line” – a key word in the fashion journalist’s lexicon – creating new names for each (the “Ovale,” the “Tulip”) and thus giving journalists ready-made headlines. The Maison Dior also provided press packs that included official photos and advice on styling. Dior was, in turn, rewarded with extensive press coverage.
Dior opened a New York branch in 1948 and launched a special collection of ready-to-wear for the U.S. market and later bonded copies and patterns. There was also plenty of copying on Seventh Avenue, bringing couture design to the mass market.
p.147 – As fashion became news, fashion journalism came of age. The impact of Dior and “The New Look” turned designers into household names, while the New York schedules also helped former amateurs become professional reporters. […] Journalists were expected to be extremely knowledgeable.
p.148 – The fashion journalist was expected to be able to distill the message from the couturiers, pronounce on the significant trends, and make judgments on key looks for both readers and buyers.
7 – The Rise of Individualism: The 1960s and 1970s
p.160 – A new icon of femininity emerged: the single girl who was financially, and by implication, sexually independent. Fashion photography both created and reflected her changing status and freedom: shots became much more active and the same girl jumped, ran, and looked real.
A new type of designer clothing emerged in Paris and elsewhere: prêt-à-porter. Yves Saint Laurent launched Rive Gauche in 1966, the first stand-alone ready-to-wear label from a couturier with its own boutique.
p.162 – Meanwhile, in the U.S. the feminist movement became increasingly vocal. One of its cornerstones, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), had been highly critical of the role of women’s magazines in promoting limiting definitions of femininity.
Overall, a new type of fashion – and of fashion writing – emerged during the 1970s that was centered on self-styling. Enabling rather than dictatorial, it was based on the touchstone ideas of “freedom” and “choice.” A subcultural influence bubbled up, the street began to feature in fashion editorial. […] Bill Cunningham inaugurated his street fashion shots for the New York Times in 1978. Individualism emerged as a key cultural signifier, as epitomized by Condé Nast’s 1979 launch of Self.
p.181 – The fashion press has been targeting male readers since the early 1960s, but men’s new importance was largely the result of the link between music and fashion in popular culture. Heralded by the 1950s Beatniks in America and the Teddy Boy, a new dandy – “the Mod” – was born in Britain. New shops and designers supplied menswear. Paco Rabanne had started menswear in 1959. […] The hedonistic “playboy” aesthetic, which had developed in America in the 1950s, became widespread.
p.183 – In the 1970s, the rise of the Gay Rights movement provided a new impetus to the fashion-conscious male. Expenditure on male clothing rose, as reflected in L’Uomo Vogue. Originally launched in 1968 as a biannual trade magazine to support the burgeoning Italian menswear industry; it became a monthly in 1975.
p.186 – Influenced by Cosmopolitan, other fashion magazines started to focus on fashion as empowerment. Nowhere was the shift from the 1960s optimism and fashion fantasy to 1970s realism and the demands of the “working woman” more apparent than at American Vogue under the editorship
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