Documenting Fashion

Offers the first edited collection with an explicit documentary focus on fashion icons, events, cultures and industries Investigates the bearings of the documentary image and its visual politics in relation to fashion Pushes forward new understandings of how different media and platforms, such as documentary feature films, television factual programmes, online videos, fashion exhibitions, edutainment and industrial films, interrogate 'the real' in relation to fashion Considers a wide range of both contemporary and historical case studies, including analysis of fashion documentaries, fashion-series on television and online videos, including Queer Eye (2018), Follow Me (2017), Bill Cunningham New York (2010), and McQueen (2018) Includes two expanding interviews, one with Alexandra Palmer, senior fashion curator at Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, and one with Lorna Tucker, director of Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activists (2018) Feuds within fashion houses, megalomaniacs and photoshoot nightmares fashion and drama have been a perfect match for decades. Over the past ten years, we have witnessed a boom of documentaries about fashion magazine editors, fashion and media politics and the history of fashion houses. How and why did fashion documentaries and non-fiction media become so popular? Documenting Fashion explores and reassesses the role of documentary media by tracing its history in shaping our understanding of fashion across multiple platforms and different national contexts, including industrial films, newsreels, TV shows, documentary films, digital media and photography. The essays in this collection underpin and profile a scholarly space in which a dialogue between fashion and documentary studies can evolve by drawing from different methodologies and approaches, such as media and cultural studies, ethnography, archival and museum studies, gender studies, marketing and public relations.

Elena Caoduro is Lecturer in Media Analysis at Queen’s University Belfast, UK. She is the co-editor of Mediated Terrorism in the 21st century (with Karen Ritzenhoff and Karen Randell, 2021). She has previously published on nostalgia, cultural memory, vintage media and fashion films in journals, such as Comunicazioni Sociali, NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, and Cinémas Revue d'études cinématographiques. Boel Ulfsdotter is Reader in Film Studies at the Faculty of Humanities at Gothenburg University, Sweden. Her areas of research are rooted in theoretical perspectives on female subjectivity in visual and popular culture, with special focus on documentary cinema, visual style, and screen costume. She has also published on contemporary women’s power dressing, fashion exhibition practice, and screen costume. Boel Ulfsdotter’s latest scholarly publication is Documenting Fashion (2023), co-edited with Elena Caoduro. In 2018, Ulfsdotter co-edited a twin-volume on the topic of female authorship for Edinburgh University Press: Female Authorship and the Documentary Image, and Female Agency and Documentary Strategies.