While I have demonstrated in Chapter Two the symbolic production of fashion journalists through fashion writing and how they uphold the fashion industry’s values through this, there are additional essential factors grounded in the embodied role of the fashion journalist. This chapter will engage with Bolter and Grusin’s concept of remediation as well as Rocamora’s work with an emphasis on the fashion media. Furthermore, I will analyze the persona of the redefined fashion journalist by the work of Lantz and her definition of cultural intermediaries and tastemakers. Exemplified through Pandora Sykes, I will outline the complex three-part role of fashion journalists and the tropes of “entrepreneurial femininity” as addressed by Duffy and Hund. Remediation is, how Bolter and Grusin put it,...
While I have demonstrated in Chapter Two the symbolic production of fashion journalists through fashion writing and how they uphold the fashion industry’s values through this, there are additional essential factors grounded in the embodied role of the fashion journalist. This chapter will engage with Bolter and Grusin’s concept of remediation as well as Rocamora’s work with an emphasis on the fashion media. Furthermore, I will analyze the persona of the redefined fashion journalist by the work of Lantz and her definition of cultural intermediaries and tastemakers. Exemplified through Pandora Sykes, I will outline the complex three-part role of fashion journalists and the tropes of “entrepreneurial femininity” as addressed by Duffy and Hund.
Remediation is, how Bolter and Grusin put it, an “import [of] earlier media into a digital space in order to critique and refashion them”. In the fashion media, this could be incorporation or representation of one medium into the other, such as the old media into new media and vice versa. While Rocamora agrees that “new and old media (…) feed into each other”, she goes further by addressing that remediation can be recognized between fashion blogs and print publications. Her argument that each of them is borrowing elements from the other has been proved in many ways, with fashion magazines copying terms such as ‘shop the look’ and bloggers taking editorials as visual inspiration for their own shoots.
With digital media becoming the dominant format in the fashion media, it is constantly remediating old media formats, including television, radio, and print. To briefly return to Rocamora’s argument, it can be said that the concept of remediation has become more refined in the digital age. A live-streamed catwalk show on the Business of Fashion website, for example, remediates a real-time event that is then distributed to digital screens. In this sense, the mirroring of the live event becomes a one-of-a-kind experience for the observer, who gets to experience fashion in different formats. In light of this, I further argue that remediation has fed into the role of the digital fashion journalist throughout this chapter, who is no longer solely focused on fashion writing but on representing the ideal powerful persona through him or herself.
