A History of Exhibiting Art and Fashion in British Fashion Magazine Photo-spreads 1945 - 1970

This thesis examines a history of post-war British fashion media's engagement with the field of art. This will be addressed through a focused analysis of editorial photo-spreads - produced in selected British fashion magazines - that feature institutional spaces such as museums and art galleries, and objects such as paintings and sculpture that are common to a public conception of 'art' and 'high culture'. This study aims to re-address histories of fashion photography, art, and culture through questioning how British fashion media and photography have directly contributed to the cultural production of what is known to be the field of modern art.

This area of investigation will be conducted through primary historical research drawn from the archives of selected fashion periodicals British Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and Queen. My methodological approach to this form of material culture draws upon the theoretical work of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. I will consider how this type of fashion imagery has been constructed through an economy of ideological, commercial and cultural exchange between the fields of art and fashion. I will further address this type of exchange in the examination of social and professional networks that pertain to these relations, as presented in fashion media discourse within this specific historical time period.

Through the systematic recording, mapping, and analyses of this historical data, I will address the direct contribution that this fashion archive of post-war British fashion periodicals, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and Queen, makes to a contemporary knowledge and understanding of 20th Century British art history, photography and visual culture. In undertaking this form of historical survey a central aim of this thesis is to contribute to a contemporary knowledge of fashion photography through acknowledging and analysing its history of exhibiting art and fashion in British fashion magazines. This thesis is an interdisciplinary history of visual culture and presents a vital and relevant contribution to research within modern arts and humanities academia.

Supervisors: Agnes Rocamora, Alistair O'Neill, Helen Thomas