Ready-to-wear collections as long-lasting: phenomenon of "slow fashion print" and shifts in representation of fashion
Abstract
The paper discusses shifts in representation of ready-to-wear fashion in the context of the emerging cultural trend to celebrate the "slow lifestyle": quality of life, everyday aesthetic and personal relationships with things. Slow lifestyle movement has found its manifestation particularly in "slow print", biannual magazines devoted to travelling, literature, food, fashion, architecture.
The paper focuses on biannual fashion magazines (The Gentlewoman, Fantastic Man), that represent current seasonal collections as long-lasting. The concept "long-lasting", as discussed in the paper, applies to an approach in fashion that focuses on quality, value, and authenticity.
The growing tendency to mediate "slow" fashion is seen as a reaction against industry's unsustainable pace. Many opine that industry has become too big, and too fast.
In order to investigate the shifts in representation of fashion, Roland Barthes' methodology (the structural analysis of written clothing as described in magazines) has been applied to analyse the material. Barthes defined fashion as opposite to "natural", constructed by narrow instance of fashion group, and reproduced every year anew.
The biannuals investigated mediate a rather radical understanding of fashion as something "real". The paper analyses verbal structures of clothes presented in magazines promoting long-lasting fashion and discusses the changes in vocabulary.
As paper argues, by putting the demand for newness on the back-burner, these publications offer their readers to make "a back translation": from "fashion clothing" (a construction that is traditionally understood as "opposed to natural") to "real clothing". The idea is to straighten a link between fashion and "reality" (to emphasize aesthetic utility of garments) and to weaken fashion's dependence on imagery (to diminish perception of fashion as simulacrum).