The Three Cs of fashion media today : convergence, creativity and control

Abstract

Over the last decade fashion media has gravitated online, like many other cultural phenomena. This is evident from the fundamental shift in ways that fashion is now mediated, from the twentieth-century staples of runway shows and glossy magazines towards blogs, the moving image and social networking media. Despite the longstanding link between the fashion system and media technologies, though, there has been, as Jennifer Craik notes, surprisingly little critical analysis of the contours of this relationship (2009: 246). As such, an interdisciplinary analysis of fashion from a media studies framework is both timely and pertinent. Put simply, the state of contemporary fashion media speaks through (and about) technological convergence, fuelled by an increasing ability to carry and convert content sound, data, image or text into multiple formats in the digital domain (Cunningham & Turner 2010: 3). A key effect of convergence is the multiplication of media. In new fashion media, for instance, a collection launched by one of the major fashion houses today (like Chanel, Prada or Burberry) will invariably find multiple forms online: streamed as a YouTube runway show; accompanied by a fashion film; promoted via an interactive website, Facebook page, iPhone/iPad app, official blog, Flickr photo gallery and discussed via Twitter. To consider the extensive, and real time, access to a global fashion audience, the scale and extent of this development is striking. The Spring/Summer 2010 collection from the late Alexander McQueen, for instance, was streamed live to a YouTube audience of over 1.5 million viewers, many of whom extended the experience through YouTube commentary, Facebook 'likes', 'shares' and a whirlwind of Tweets. Consistent with other examples of technological convergence, then, fashion media has been transformed into a model of dispersal and fragmentation, in the production, distribution and consumption of content (Cohen, Salazar & Barkat 2009: 357).

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