Contemporary Fashion Tastemakers: Starting Conversations that Matter

Matthews, Rachel ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3561-6166 (2015) Contemporary Fashion Tastemakers: Starting Conversations that Matter. Catwalk: The Journal of Fashion Beauty and Style, 4 (1). pp. 51-70. ISSN 2045-2349

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Abstract

This article examines contemporary fashion tastemakers and their role in the complex and evolving mechanisms of fashion diffusion in the twenty-first century. It focuses on two groups of fashion tastemakers: selected fashion journalists and high profile fashion bloggers. By undertaking discourse analysis of their tastemaking activities, this study explores actions by these fashion commentators that function as a catalyst for a range of activities that assist with the fashion diffusion process. The contemporary fashion tastemakers studied here utilise language to write about and verbalise their tastes as a key aspect of their tastemaking operations. Textual analysis undertaken as part of this study focuses on the way their statements identify and name new fashion ideas and items while dismissing a vast number of other possibilities. Their activities filter and classify their selections as fashion and place nominated fashion objects within popular fashion discourse. Informed by the social theorist Michel Foucault’s perspectives on discourse in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), this article examines the relationship of the commentators’ language to other social processes. Their written expressions transform fashion propositions into digital textual forms, which are searchable on the Internet. Their actions initiate conversations and social interaction around specific fashion objects, and these enable new fashion ideas to become socially mobile, readily shared through a variety of networks. Through greater circulation, the potential for these objects to be accepted and adopted as a new element of the fashionable aesthetic is increased