SUMMARY

Dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of fashion from an academic perspective, the quarterly journal Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture views fashion as a cultural phenomenon, offering the reader a wide range of articles by leading Western and Russian specialists, as well as classical texts on fashion theory. From the history of dress and design to body practices; from the work of well-known designers to issues around consumption in fashion; from beauty and the fashionable figure through the ages to fashion journalism, fashion and PR, fashion and city life, art and fashion, fashion and photography — Fashion Theory covers it all.

In this issue’s Dress section, Becky E. Conekin presents Lee Miller: Model, Photographer, and War Correspondent in Vogue, 1927–1953. The famous American photographer and war correspondent was active with Vogue for many years, yet the importance of this work for her career was never widely acknowledged. Lee’s relationship with Vogue began in 1927. At first, she modeled. In 1930 she became a photographer for the magazine. By 1944, Lee had acquired and was putting to good use a Hermes portable typewriter. Equally gifted in her work in front of, and behind, the camera, Lee took to the role of journalist and war correspondent with ease and enthusiasm. In 1953, British Vogue published Lee’s final article and photographs as correspondent. All in all, the partnership lasted for over 25 years, bringing Lee Miller fame in three countries.

Rebecca Arnold offers Looking American: Louise Dahl-Wolfe’s Fashion Photographs of the 1930s and 1940s. Louise Dahl-Wolfe was a photographer whose career stretched from 1933 to 1960, thus encompassing a turbulent period in American history, from the Depression to the Second World War to the start of the Cold War. In her analysis of Dahl-Wolfe’s fashion photographs, Rebecca Arnold considers how they position women as models and as spectators, and how these works may be interpreted in terms of America’s goals. The author uses fashion photographs as texts to be compared to other visual and documentary evidence of the period. So, rather than providing an exhaustive account of Dahl-Wolfe’s work and life, Arnold looks at specific images from the 1930s and 1940s and considers how they might be contextualized geographically, historically and socially. Through a study of these photographs, she seeks greater understanding of the ways America saw itself during this period, and of the complex process of ‘making’ American identity.

In Bloody Jumpers: Benetton and the Mechanics of Cultural Exclusion, Paul Antick, photographer and lecturer in Visual Culture and Media at Middlesex University, UK, draws attention to the ways in which the denigration and classification of advertising photography as a fundamentally ‘inauthentic’ type of ‘speech act’ can often serve to obfuscate the particularities of its communicative potential, specifically in relation to the ways in which particular adverts might use photography both to reinforce and subvert dominant ideologies in specific interpretative contexts.

Liz Willis-Tropea presents Glamour Photography and the Institutionalization of Celebrity Culture. This article documents the visual introduction of glamour to American popular culture through the development of ‘glamour photography’. As a result of the artistic, institutional, and technological conditions that converged from the mid1920s through the early 1930s, this new mode of publicity photography materialized, dramatically shifting the way film stars were imaged and the channels through which their images were disseminated.  This aesthetic and institutional shift connected the somewhat ambiguous idea of glamour with the evolving technologies of publicity photography perfected by Edward Steichen and his peers in the late 1920s. Inspired Hollywood studio photographers such as George Hurrell established a ‘semiotics of glamour’ by endlessly reproducing a set of visual signs consisting of technical qualities (such as lighting, retouching, and focus) coupled with an increasingly sexualized, gender-specific appearance of subjects (including poses, costumes, hair, and makeup). No longer the domain of continental imports Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich, glamour was positively proven to exist through publicity photographs of all Hollywood beauties, becoming identifiable, reproducible, and therefore accessible. By the mid-1930s, studio publicists and advertisers had responded to the demand for glamour by recasting the formerly elusive, magical concept into a consumable, attainable, all-American mode of white femininity.

In this issue’s Body section, Joshua Miller contributes Beauty and Democratic Power. Despite the near silence of political theory on the topic, it nevertheless requires only a few moments’ reflection to realize that fashion is a politically significant subject. The design, manufacture, and sale of clothes constitute a multi-billion dollar industry. Fashion has become a cultural obsession, and models and designers are international celebrities. At the same time, fashion is, as always, celebrated by some cultural commentators while denigrated by others. Joshua Miller examines one aspect of fashion - beauty or sexy dressing - and its relationship to power, by which the author means influence, control, or material gain.

Masafumi Monden’s piece is entitled Layers of the Ethereal: A Cultural Investigation of Beauty, Girlhood, and Ballet in Japanese Shōjo Manga. The popularity of classical ballet as a cultural form grows apace in a global context. Even in a country like Japan, which has not been previously identified as a ‘ballet capital’, it is receiving wide public attention. As a conventionally female-dominated arena, ballet and the ideas that circulate around it reveal the complex interrelationship between femininity, beauty, and selfhood. A prime example is the understudied genre of ‘ballet manga’ in Japanese Shōjo manga culture. With the first examples published in the mid-1950s, the history of ballet-themed manga reveals that, particularly in the years following the Second World War, ballet was the epitome of a dream world, connoting luxury, beauty, and glamour. ‘Ballet manga’ used this particular art form, its costumes and romanticized, almost fairy tale-like settings of Old World Europe as a mix of femininity, rigor, and elegance remade for Japanese audiences. Since the 1970s, some authors have attempted to combine this imagery of ballet with the idea of feminine independence and agency, thus negotiating the paradox of reality and fantasy in lived experience. Ballet, therefore, is not presented simply on the stage, but in Japan is frequently interpreted/ experienced through sh€jo manga. This distinctive situation deserves closer scholarly investigation.

Ksenia Borderiu offers The Beauty Canons of the Russian Nobility in the Age of Enlightenment. The traditional canons of Russian beauty have been the subject of much research. Our ancestors held physical beauty in high respect, seeing it as connected to good health and moral fibre. In this piece, the author looks at how popular Russian ideas on beauty and attractiveness in the second half of the 18th century combined with contemporary European medical, physiological and psychological theories. Borderiu focuses on the type of physical beauty that served as the basis for the development of contemporary fashions, since the styles, accessories and cosmetic practices of a particular era can be said to emerge in relation to the stable notions on ideal beauty that are prevalent at that time.

Maria Mackinney-Valentin’s Face Value: Subversive Beauty Ideals in Contemporary Fashion Marketing explores the use of models in contemporary fashion marketing through five cases from high-end fashion brands. The models represent subversive beauty ideals, and the aim of the analysis is to determine whether these ‘faces’ are intended to challenge stereotypes concerning age, gender, body and sexuality, or whether they are examples of marketing, absorbing consumer behaviour to appeal to contemporary consumers. The research is based on fashion campaigns and runway shows in mainly luxury fashion brands in the Euro-American market in the period 2009–2012. The article concludes that while greater diversity may be a positive side effect of the use of subversive beauty ideals, the stereotypes are also the prerequisite for the social strategy at play. This strategy deals with the Logic of Wrong, where social distinction is created through literally doing something that is considered socially or culturally wrong.

In this issue’s Culture section, Rebecca Houze offers Fashionable Reform Dress and the Invention of ‘Style’ in Fin-de siōcle Vienna. Reform dress in Vienna at the turn of the century began as a therapeutic, antifashion movement that was glamorized and transformed into ‘stylish’ dress within only a few years. The establishment of the Wiener Werkst€tte fashion division, which was organized by the Secessionist architect Josef Hoffmann in 1911, marked the transformation. This article examines the official reception of reform dress in Vienna in 1902 by the Verein zur Verbesserung der Frauenkleidung (Organization for the Improvement of Women’s Dress), as well as the publication of several articles that same year by artists and critics on the topic of reform dress in the Viennese feminist journal, Dokumente der Frauen.

Elina Voitsekhovskaya contributes Vienna: One Hundred Years of Timelessness. The Cultural Consequences of the Great War. Having had the good fortune to be in the right place at the right time, the author uses aesthetic analysis to compare details of Viennese decor from 1914 to those from 2014. In Voitsekhovskaya’s opinion, the local and imported imperial and new artifacts used in her analysis give no less vivid a picture of their time than contemporary military accounts.

In the Museum Business column, A Heady Relationship: Fashion Photography and the Museum, 1979 to the Present by Val Williams looks at the relationship between fashion photography and the museum between 1979 and our time, paying particular attention to the emergence of fashion photography as a part of museum programming in the late 1970s. Williams explores the often uneasy relationship between photographers and their fashion practice, and the ways in which the museum has used fashion photography to increase and democratize audience.

In this issue’s Events section, Margarita Albedil presents Will You Go to the Ball? The author reviews the ‘Balls Glittering and Raucous: High Society Revelry in 18th — 20th Century St. Petersburg’ exhibition at the Commandant’s House of the Peter and Paul Fortress, St. Petersburg (30 October 2014 — 13 September 2015).

In Shots of Surrealist Stories, Gaba Naimanovich reviews ‘Guy Bourdin: Image-Maker’ at London’s Somerset House (27 November 2014 — 15 March 2015).

Elena Igumnova visits ‘Philip Treacy: Hats in the 21st Century’ at the Chertkov House, Moscow (27 November 2014 — 25 January 2015) and shares her impressions in her piece Beyond Boundaries.

In this issue’s Books section, Liuba Popova’s Discovering a New World  reviews Un Mondo Nuovo by Ennio Capasa (Milan: Bompiani, 2014).

A Denim Suit for Clark Gable by Ksenia Gussarova takes a look at Paul Jobling’s Advertising Menswear: Masculinity and Fashion in the British Media since 1945 (London; New Delhi; New York; Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2014).

In The Art of Living by Agreements between the Sides, Ksenia Borderiu reviews Roman Meinhold’s Fashion Myths, A Cultural Critique (Transcript-Verlag, 2013).
The Heavy Industry of Fashion by Natalia Lebina takes a look at Sergei Zhuravlev and Jukka Gronow’s Fashion According to Plan: The History of Fashion and Design in the USSR, 1917—1991 (Moscow: Institute of Russian History at the Russian Academy of Sciences, 2013).