Fashionating Images: Audiovisual Media Studies Meet Fashion

Over the past decades, fashion has acquired centrality in social and economic processes in Western culture for its capacity to penetrate and influence both cultural production and identitarian practices. In the last few years, the proliferation of media objects, such as fashion films, makeover TV shows, fashion blogs and vlogs has shown how prolific the encounter between fashion and audiovisual media can be. The aim of this special issue is to explore this intersection and, consequently, the cross fertilization between fashion studies and media studies, with particular regard to audiovisual media, such as cinema, television, advertising and digital video. The essays in this special issue adopt different methods and theoretical perspectives – from semiotics to audience studies – and they are written with different formulas – from wide-ranging exploration to close analysis of single case studies. All contributions, however, question the encounter between fashion and specific audiovisual formats, e.g. cinema, videoart, television, advertising, web media. A first group of contributions describes the features of fashion films. A second group of essays considers the ‘working in tandem’ of fashion and film and raises a series of theoretical issues related to the problem of materiality and per- formativity (organic/inorganic, human/non human agency) in the fashion-cinema couple. A third group of essays focuses on the transformation of spectatorships and con- sumption into a series of appropriation practices based on the performative use of digital media.