Fashion Tales

Emanuela Mora & Marco Pedroni (eds.)

Fashion Tales

Feeding the Imaginary

PETER LANG

Bern · Bruxelles · Frankfurt am Main · New York · Oxford · Warszawa · Wien

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2017945473

Cover Illustration: “Black&Red Bodypainting”, source: splitshire.com

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About the editors

Emanuela Mora is a Full Professor of Sociology of Culture and Communication in the School for Political and Social Sciences at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore of Milan (Italy), where she coordinates the Doctorate School in Sociology and is member of the Direction Board of ModaCult, Centre for Fashion and Cultural Production Studies. She is a Co-Editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Fashion Studies published by Intellect Books.

Marco Pedroni is an Associate Professor of Sociology of Culture at the eCampus University (Italy), School of Law. Formerly he was a Research Fellow and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Bergamo, an Adjunct Professor at the Politecnico of Milan, and a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Università Cattolica of Milan.

About the book

Since its beginnings in the middle of the 19th century, fashion has been narrated through multiple media, both visual and verbal, and for such different purposes as marketing and advertising, art, costume history, social research and cultural dissemination. In this light, fashion has represented an important piece of material culture in modern industrial urban societies and in postcolonial and non-western contexts. Today, we are witnessing a turn in this imaginary as issues related to social, environmental and cultural sustainability come to predominate in many areas of human activity.

The book addresses this challenge. By facilitating encounters between disciplines and cultures, it explores a multitude of fashion issues, practices and views that feed the contemporary fashion imaginary: local cultures, linguistic codes, TV series, movies, magazines, ads, blogs, bodily practices. The book deals with a paramount issue for fashion studies: how do the production and circulation of fashion imaginary come about in the 21st century?

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This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

Table of Contents

List of figures and tables

Emanuela Mora and Marco Pedroni

New frontiers of the fashion imaginary

Part 1: Fashion and the media

Romana Andò

Fashion fandom and TV quality drama: From poaching to everyday identity performance through Pinterest

Luisa Valeriani

Dressed in politics: The use of costumes in Game of Thrones

Phylis Johnson

Second life community and global citizenship: A fashion tale of a virtual empire

Marco Pedroni, Teresa Sádaba and Patricia SanMiguel

Is the golden era of fashion blogs over? An analysis of the Italian and Spanish fields of fashion blogging

Marina Ramos-­Serrano and Gema Macías-­Muñoz

Lady Dior: Brand values in fashion films

Eugenie Maria Theuer

Kaleidoscopes of cloth and canvas: A phenomenological approach to fashion on the cinematic red carpet ←5 | 6→

Nick Rees-­Roberts

Behind-­the-­scenes: Framing fashion and the limits of the documentary mode

Part 2: Fashion in the making

Cecilia Winterhalter

The re-­invention of Made in Italy goods: Italian know-­how in product innovation in the work of three Italian women Crafters

Monia Massarini and Rubens Pauluzzo

Emerging Chinese fashion brands: The silent revolution?

Marco Ricchetti and Karan Khurana

Shifting perspectives on sustainable supply chain management in the fashion business

Valentina Jacometti

Sustainable consciousness and consumer identity: Legal tools and rules

Part 3: Politics of Fashion

Tereza Kuldova

On fashion and illusions: Designing interpassive Indianness for India’s rich

Lígia Carvalho Abreu

Human rights in fashion creations, production and branding: A genuine policy or a marketing strategy? ←6 | 7→

Barbara Pozzo

Protecting the dignity of women in fashion advertisement: The new legal initiatives in a comparative law perspective

Sinah Theres Kloß

Performing authenticity through fashion: Sartorial contestations of Hindu-­Guyanese Indianness and the creation of the Indian ‘other’

Cristiana Katagiri and Virginia Abreu Borges

Brazilian fashion: Dichotomies and perspectives of resistance

Part 4: Fashion languages

Maria Catricalà

Fashion, journalism and linguistic design: A case study of the wedding dresses

Manuela Caniato

Is Vogue like Vogue all around the world? A comparison of Facebook posts of Vogue France, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, and United Kingdom

Gevisa La Rocca and Maddalena Fedele

Television clothing commercials for tweens in transition: A comparative analysis in Italy and Spain

Alessandra Castellani

Tattooing, body and beauty

Abstracts and Keywords

Biographies ←7 | 8→ ←8 | 9→

List of figures and tables

Figure 1.1: Sheldon Cooper’s outfit on Pinterest

Figure 1.2: Downton Abbey’s women and clothes by BAZAAR UK on Pinterest

Figure 1.3: Claire Underwood’s blazer on Pinterest

Figure 1.4: Claire Underwood’s outfit from Polyvore shared on Pinterest

Figure 1.5: Downton Abbey hairstyle performing on Pinterest

Figure 2.1: Olenna with ser Kevan Lannister, S06e04

Figure 2.2: Tyrion Hand promo, S02

Figure 2.3: Daenerys in S05e02, The House of Black and White

Figure 2.4: Margaery Tyrell into king Joffrey’s chamber, S03e02

Figure 2.5: Cersei gown for Purple Wedding, s04e02

Figure 2.6: Cersei Lannister on the Iron Throne, S06e10

Figure 2.7: Tywin Lannister Hand of the King, S03

Figure 3.1: Virtual Fashionista in Second Life

Table 4.1: A comparison between the top 10 bloggers in Italy and Spain

Table 4.2: Positions in the international tanking

Table 5.1: Narration Actants according to Greimas ←9 | 10→

Table 5.2: Fashion films analysed

Table 5.3: Brand values

Table 5.4: Actantial analysis of the fashion films studied

Figure 5.1: Types of placement in Lady Dior fashion films

Figure 5.2: Brand presence in the dramatic structure

Figure 6.1: Charley’s costume in A Single Man shares many similarities with Julianne Moore’s gown at the Golden Globes

Figures 6.2, 6.3, 6.4: The robot’s transformation is captured by superimposing a shot of actress Brigitte Helm over a shot of the robot

Table 9.1: Categories assessing the COO of a Fashion Brand

Table 9.2: Chinese Fashion Brands. Detailed List

Figure 9.1: Chinese fashion brands. Clusters

Figure 10.1: Per-­capita consumption of textile fibres (1960–2015); values in kg

Figure 14.1: Sarah Chole, ‘For bad girls’ campaign

Figure 14.2: Fracomina campaign

Figure 17.1: The ‘geology of the fashion signs’ by Barthes

Table 17.1: Some meaningful difference between the Italian edition of Marie Claire 2013–2014 and the English version of the same magazine

Figures 17.2: Example of classification of the wedding dresses in consideration of the silhouette

Figure 17.3: Juliet and tulip sleeves ←10 | 11→

Table 18.1: Number of Vogue posts published on Facebook per edition

Table 18.2: Number of shares per edition

Table 18.3: Share rate per edition

Table 18.4: Posts with comments per edition

Table 18.5: Themes present in the posts of some of the editions

Table 18.6: Number of posts according to theme

Table 18.7: Posts devoted to Fashion (grey) and Celebrity (black) per country

Table 18.8: Number of posts according to theme

Table 18.9: The most frequent Anglicisms in the posts ←11 | 12→ ←12 | 13→

Emanuela Mora and Marco Pedroni

New frontiers of the fashion imaginary

When Franca Sozzani passed away in December 2016, published in the press and on the Web were numerous emotional remembrances of the woman who, as editor-­in-­chief of Vogue Italia since 1988, was unanimously recognized as one of the most influential persons in the field of fashion. ‘She overturned the history of costume by inventing a new way to recount fashion visually’; she was able to ‘anticipate trends and fashions like no-­one else because it was she who created them’; she was the ‘first to understand the importance of narrative in fashion images’ (Tibaldi 2016). She did so with editorials constructed as stories in order to provoke discussion, ‘as when Linda Evangelista plays a plastic surgery maniac, or when models end up in rehab and in an eerie religious community, or when they are roughed up by security guards at an airport gate, victims of the control mania of our times’ (ibid.). In terms of this book and the scientific project that inspired it, Sozzani is a perfect example of a creator of the imaginary, and her work for an influential fashion magazine contributed for nearly three decades to fostering, changing, and challenging it. But she was certainly not alone in doing so, and the study of the complex processes involved in construction of the imaginary requires extension of the treatment from the key actors of contemporary fashion to the processes that they have triggered, or of which they are witnesses and protagonists.