Documenting Fashion

by Elena Caoduro (Editor), Boel Ulfsdotter (Editor)

Overview

Feuds within fashion houses, megalomaniacs and photoshoot nightmares – fashion and drama have been a perfect match for decades. Over the past ten years, we have witnessed a boom of documentaries about fashion magazine editors, fashion and media politics and the history of fashion houses.
How and why did fashion documentaries and non-fiction media become so popular? Documenting Fashion explores and reassesses the role of documentary media by tracing its history in shaping our understanding of fashion across multiple platforms and different national contexts, including industrial films, newsreels, TV shows, documentary films, digital media and photography. The essays in this collection underpin and profile a scholarly space in which a dialogue between fashion and documentary studies can evolve by drawing from different methodologies and approaches, such as media and cultural studies, ethnography, archival and museum studies, gender studies, marketing and public relations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781474476171
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	11/30/2024
Series:	Film and Fashions
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Elena Caoduro is Lecturer in Media Analysis at Queen’s UniversityBelfast, UK. She is the co-editor of Mediated Terrorism in the 21st century (with Karen Ritzenhoff and Karen Randell, 2021). She has previously published on nostalgia, cultural memory, vintage media and fashion films in journals, such as Comunicazioni Sociali, NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, and Cinémas Revue d'études cinématographiques.

Boel Ulfsdotter is Reader in Film Studies at the Faculty of Humanities at Gothenburg University, Sweden. Her areas of research are rooted in theoretical perspectives on female subjectivity in visual and popular culture, with special focus on documentary cinema, visual style, and screen costume. She has also published on contemporary women’s power dressing, fashion exhibition practice, and screen costume. Boel Ulfsdotter’s latest scholarly publication is Documenting Fashion (2023), co-edited with Elena Caoduro. In 2018, Ulfsdotter co-edited a twin-volume on the topic of female authorship for Edinburgh UniversityPress: Female Authorship and the Documentary Image, and Female Agency and Documentary Strategies.

Table of Contents

List of IllustrationsAcknowledgementsNotes on the Contributors

Introduction

Part I: Film

1. Fashion Documentaries and the tension between celebratory and critical approaches by Elena Caoduro

Expanding Interview 1: Elena Caoduro in conversation with Lorna Tucker

2. "The Helen Rose Originals are Fabulous": The Fashion Featurette and Fashion Show as Sites of Industrial Reflexivity by Julie Nakama

3. The Fashion of East and West in German Cinema Newsreels (1950-1965) by Sigrun Lehnert

4. Third Way Teenage Fashion: Housewives’ Films Documenting Ideals of Middleclass Youth Culture in 1950s Sweden by Mats Björkin

5. A Maverick on the Streets: Bill Cunningham and the Documentary Process by Karen Ritzenhoff

6. Extending the exhibition narrative: making sense of non-fiction fashion footage by Boel Ulfsdotter

Expanding Interview 2: Boel Ulfsdotter in conversation with Alexandra Palmer

Part II: Television

7. Documenting Fashion History: Television and the Temporalities of Cultural Remembrance by Jihane Dyer

8 Italian ready-to-wear fashion through Cori-carousels by Giulia Caffaro

9. Fashioning Self-Care: Queer Eye, Affect, and Makeover Culture by Elizabeth Affuso

Part III: Digital media

10. From Newsreel to ‘See Now, Buy Now’: A Genealogy of the Fashion Show Live Stream by Rebecca Halliday

11. Documenting fashion in the era of Instagram: A critical reading of Asri Bendacha’s Follow Me and Chiara Ferragni’s Unposted by Marco Pedroni

Index

Editorial Reviews

This original and much needed volume fills a gap in scholarship and exposes the important contribution that fashion documentaries offer to our understanding of consumer and celebrity culture.

Vicki Karaminas

An original, rich and timely compendium on the relationship between fashion and the documentary moving image that explores the topic from a variety of disciplines, from film and media studies to design, communication, history, and journalism. Documenting Fashion brings together contributions that compellingly illuminate the fundamental role of the non-fiction moving image in the theorization of fashion.

Monica Titton