With the rise of digital media, the role of the fashion journalist has changed. Because today’s industry is strongly dominated by social media platforms, content production in the field of fashion media has become accelerated and driven by immediacy. In this paper, I will investigate the redefinition of the fashion journalist today and determine how the role has become adapted to the field of digital media. Chapter One explores digital fashion media, and the position fashion journalists place themselves within the field, by outlining how it is traditionally construed with the help of Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory. This chapter will then look at the Forms of Capital, as addressed by Bourdieu in order to define the...
With the rise of digital media, the role of the fashion journalist has changed. Because today’s industry is strongly dominated by social media platforms, content production in the field of fashion media has become accelerated and driven by immediacy. In this paper, I will investigate the redefinition of the fashion journalist today and determine how the role has become adapted to the field of digital media.
Chapter One explores digital fashion media, and the position fashion journalists place themselves within the field, by outlining how it is traditionally construed with the help of Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory. This chapter will then look at the Forms of Capital, as addressed by Bourdieu in order to define the kind of capitals fashion journalists possess nowadays and to identify the most important ones in the field of digital media.
Symbolic production and how value for fashion is created by fashion journalists make the base of my discussion in Chapter Two, where I will explore the work of Bourdieu in Webb & Schirato, Rocamora and Kawamura. With content production having become driven by immediacy in the digital media, I argue that fashion writing is highly valued in the field of fashion media, with fashion journalists being the main producers of professional writing. This I will contemplate on the base of the work of Barthes – who studied the connection between words and images – and Bradford to determine the main characteristics of fashion writing produced by fashion journalists.
Chapter 3 will look at the embodied role of fashion journalists as a cultural intermediary, tastemaker and fashionable personae. As for cultural intermediaries this chapter will engage with the work of Bolter and Grusin, and Rocamora; and their definitions of remediation with emphasis on the fashion media. For the journalists in his role as a tastemaker, I am going to look at the work of Lantz and exemplify this on Pandora Sykes. In connection to their powerful personae in the field of digital media, I will argue that fashion journalists have become media brands themselves with emphasis on social media, based on the work of Duffy and Hund.
