Re-artification in a World of De-artification: Materiality and Intellectualization in Fashion Media Discourse (1949–2010)

Abstract

Through a grounded theory analysis of 1301 collection reviews from The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune, issued between 1949 and 2010, the article discusses the shift in the themes that journalists employ to make sense of the latest collections. Contemporary journalists pay far less attention to the materiality of fashion than their earlier colleagues did. In the late 20th century they construed designer fashion as an intellectual practice. The article traces this shift to developments in the structural organization of the field of high-end fashion production, which today is involved in a process of de-artification, as the commercial aspects of the fashion system became more apparent in the later 20th century. In the 1990s leading fashion journalists drew on the new intellectual conception of designer fashion to engage in a process of re-artification. Hereby they seek to create an image of cultural worth for their object of criticism and for themselves, while they also seek to reinforce the long-standing but challenged division between mass market and high-end fashion.