Ghost-busting fashion: Symbolic boundaries and the politics of time in fashion journalism

Abstract

This article examines the rhetorical tools that leading fashion journalists have used over the past 60 years when they seek to protect the idea of impenetrable temporal boundaries between contemporary fashionable dress and its history. Journalists have always taken a dim view of fashion practices that recycle historical styles in contemporary fashion design. Yet in the late 20th century they intensified this repudiation by the previously unseen use of negatively connoted temporal fashion words, like ‘retro’ and ‘nostalgia’. Journalists further combined such fashion words, declaring specific styles as passé or fashion-dead, with chronological designations to evoke the idea that such styles belong to an irretrievable chronological past. In doing so, they are ‘ghost-busting’ the presence of fashion history for the benefit of a cultural industry that is centred on a rhythmic transcendence of its own past in order to convince consumers of the apparent newness of fashion products.