Abstract
In recent years "fashion" (rapid changing of styles) has become no longer "fashionable". The fashion and luxury industry is redefining itself against the backdrop of its unsustainable pace and the emergence of experience economy.
As Business of Fashion and McKinsey&Company's report The State of Fashion 2017 claims, today consumers do not need more "stuff", but demand something valuable and emotional. Longevity and "sense of sincerity" are becoming key values for luxury sector.
Representation of fashion as "slow" and "authentic" is largely evolving by "slow" fashion print (with the rise of digital, print is not dying out, but becoming book-quality and more exclusive). As it is explicitly written on the website of biannual fashion magazine The Gentlewoman, it is a place "where real women, real events and real things are enjoyed".
The idea is that people are tired of "fake" fashion and are looking for "real" fashion. What does it mean, the "real fashion"? "Authenticity" is a tricky term, it does not have the truth values, it is not a quality.
We just believe that something is "real" or perceive that something is "fake". By using tools of discourse analysis, this paper analyses the construction of "authenticity" of luxury fashion in two successful "slow" fashion magazines: Fantastic Man and The Gentlewoman.
The paper addresses a "mismatch" between images and captions in these magazines. Photographs are artistic and experimental; they do not "properly" display and "sell" the garment (often they artistically display only a part of it).
Descriptions of garments are, on the contrary, highly detailed, technical and precise. They encourage the reader to pay closer attention to the material qualities, to "back-translate" from "fashion clothing" (construction, traditionally understood as "opposed to natural") to the aesthetic utility of "real clothing".
Shifts are not only concerned with the representation of garments, but also with the representation of women. In journalists' texts they are presented as women of their own style, they are fashion-aware, but they are not fashion-led.
To have own style, to have own wardrobe means to be "authentic". Yet to be stylised (by editorial team) means to be "fake".
The paper attempts to analyse approaches "slow" magazines use to "authentically" represent a woman in fashion magazine and not "empty" her specificity. As the result, the list of characteristics of representations of "authenticity" of fashion is introduced.