For many years, the photograph has been fashion’s primary media form. Over the past decade, however, the dissemination of fashion has grown to encompass much more than still images: it now includes films, podcasts, Web sites, sound works, online magazines and other forms—all increasingly articulated around virtual bodies and located in virtual spaces. These days, the launch of a collection by a major fashion house is accompanied by a cross-platform media experience: streamed as a YouTube runway show; accompanied by a fashion film; promoted via an interactive website, Facebook page, iPhone/iPad app, official blog, Flickr photo gallery; and discussed on Twitter. We can now try on clothes and discover the latest fashions online, interact with models in remote settings and style our outfits on a smart phone. As fashion photography moves away from the straightforward depiction of clothing to focus on existential, social, and cultural themes, the ‘fashion interactive’—digital content which users can select and control via a computer interface—seems poised to supersede the still photo-graph as fashion’s key media form.

‘Fashion’s Digital Body: Seeing and Feeling in Fashion Interactives’, in Fashion Media: Past and Present
Djurdja Bartlett, Shaun Cole, and Agnès Rocamora, eds.
Softcover, 256 pages
Published by Bloomsbury (19 December 2013).
Language: English
ISBN 9780857853097