Exploring Fashion as Communication: The Search for a new fashion history against the grain

Abstract

This introductory essay calls for a new fashion media history informed by truly interdisciplinary scholarship, nuanced in both fashion and media studies. It reflects upon the ways in which the study of fashion as communication and fashion journalism have been addressed, arguing that fashion studies has laid out a western backbone of this history that invites and deserves to be confirmed and contested. It encourages future authors to find those fashion media discourses, voices, and practices that brought attention to fashion and dress moving past the so-called ‘fashion bibles’ to unravel discourses reaching popular audiences, underrepresented minorities, unlisted geographies, and subcultures.