New Fashion Time: Hypertextuality and Remediation in the Fashion Blogosphere

Abstract:

Since their appearance in the early noughties, fashion blogs have established themselves as a central platform for the circulation of fashion related news and information. Often the creation of fashion outsiders, they have entered the mainstream fashion media, bringing to light the shifting nature of fashion journalism. The paper discusses the rise of the fashion blogosphere and the impact of new technologies on the mediation of fashion. Drawing on the notions of hypertextuality (Landow 1997) and remediation (Bolter and Grusin 2000) it contributes to a recurring question in academic studies of digital culture: how new are new media? The paper looks at the way fashion blogs define themselves in relation to traditional fashion journalism and the traditional fashion press. Their relation of co-dependence and mutual influence is unpacked to shed light on the contemporary field of the fashion media, and the role of new technologies in the production, circulation and consumption of fashion related news.

Particular attention is paid to the idea of time. Where fashion time was once neatly paced by the twice yearly collections and the monthly publications of glossies, now fashion time has accelerated, fragmented into a series of moments that have shattered its orderly pace. Pre-collection, pre-fall, cruise, resort, high summer, and Christmas collections are all new moments in this restructured fashion time, a time ruled by the imperative of immediacy Tomlinson (2007) has identified as constitutive of today’s ‘culture of speed’. The recent creation and rapid proliferation of new digital media such as fashion blogs has supported, as it has been supported by, this culture of ‘immediacy’ (Bolter and Grusin 2000, Manovich 2001). Based on an analysis of the development of digital fashion media and of the fashion blogosphere in particular, the paper interrogates the notion of time as it now unfolds in the field of fashion. In doing so it sheds light on the role of hypertextuality and remediation in the articulation of a new fashion time.

References:

Bolter, Jay David and Grusin, Richard (2000 [1999]) Remediation: Understanding New Media, Cambridge, MIT Press.

Landow, George. P. (1997) Hypertext 2.0, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Manovich, Lev (2001) The Language of New Media, Cambridge: MIT Press.

Tomlinson, John (2007) The Culture of Speed, London: Sage.

Email: a.rocamora@fashion.arts.ac.uk