What do you think?
Rate this book
Fashioning Models: Image, Text and Industry
The fashion model's hold on popular consciousness is undeniable. How did models emerge as such powerful icons in modern consumer culture?
This volume brings together cutting-edge articles on fashion models, examining modelling through race, class and gender, as well as its structure as an aesthetic marketplace within the global fashion economy.Essays include treatments of the history of fashion modelling, exploring how concerns about racial purity and the idealization of light skinned black women shaped the practice of modelling in its early years. Other essays examine how models have come to define femininity through consumer culture. While modelling's global nature is addressed throughout, chapters deal specifically with model markets in Australia and Tokyo, where nationalist concerns colour what is considered a pretty face. It also considers how models glamorize consumption through everyday activities, and neoliberal labour forms via reality TV.
With commentaries from industry professionals who experienced the cultural juggernaut of the supermodels, the final essay situates their impact within the rise of brand culture and the globalization of fashion markets since 1990.Accessible and highly engaging, Fashioning Models is essential reading for students and scholars of fashion and related disciplines.
This volume brings together cutting-edge articles on fashion models, examining modelling through race, class and gender, as well as its structure as an aesthetic marketplace within the global fashion economy.Essays include treatments of the history of fashion modelling, exploring how concerns about racial purity and the idealization of light skinned black women shaped the practice of modelling in its early years. Other essays examine how models have come to define femininity through consumer culture. While modelling's global nature is addressed throughout, chapters deal specifically with model markets in Australia and Tokyo, where nationalist concerns colour what is considered a pretty face. It also considers how models glamorize consumption through everyday activities, and neoliberal labour forms via reality TV.
With commentaries from industry professionals who experienced the cultural juggernaut of the supermodels, the final essay situates their impact within the rise of brand culture and the globalization of fashion markets since 1990.Accessible and highly engaging, Fashioning Models is essential reading for students and scholars of fashion and related disciplines.
- GenresFashion
240 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2009
About the author
Joanne Entwistle
13 books7 followersJo Entwistle is Senior Lecturer in Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King’s College London.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 29, 2013
It seems at times as if the dominant image of fashion models fluctuates between spoilt brats, exploited young women and vapid clotheshorses. In academic circles at least this view has been being undermined for some time by a growing body of work looking at models as workers, work that Entwistle and Wissenger have been key players in. This is an extremely good collection of papers that takes us well beyond the semiotic significance of models – beyond appearance and image – to explore the system of industrial and economic production of fashion models and with that the production of consumption. In Entwistle’s case this is an extension of concerns she has been exploring for over a decade (see The Fashioned Body, most especially the links between production and consumption of fashion; in this case the model as one of those links.
The collection covers both historical aspects of the ‘creation’ of models and contemporary sociological analyses, including a good range of contributors although with a focus on English language contexts, with the exception of Ashley Mears ethnographic piece dealing with modelling in Japan. Mears is one of two contributors who have made a living from working in the industry (she is now in the sociology department at Boston Uni and author of Pricing Beauty); Patricia Soley-Beltran is the other. The only other chapter that takes us outside a narrowly defined Anglo-American nexus is Margaret Maynard’s exploring the development of fashion modelling in Australia. Entwistle and Wissinger recognise this gap; analyses especially of the major European capitals – Paris & Milan would be good to see – as would further similar work dealing with emerging fashion centres – Shanghai. Dakar, Mumbai, Moscow – that might help make more sense of the global dynamics of labour migration of models; but this is an aside.
The collection effectively debunks notions of a simple narrative of linear development; Elspeth Brown’s US-focussed piece considers four types of model in early 20th century setting – the artist’s model, the cloak or wholesale showroom model, the couturier model/showgirl (the version often have in mind when using the term) and the photographic model as mediating discourses of sexuality. Other historical contributions are, with Maynard, Laila Haidarali on African American models in the late 1940s and 1950s and Soley-Beltran’s counter narrative of glamour as labour.
As useful as these historical pieces are, for my current interests I found the more sociological papers more useful. Entwistle’s essay with Don Slater analysing bodies and their images using a form of actor network theory to argue first that central to understanding the image of the model is making sense of ‘the look’ as an organising concept, and second that considering each model as a ‘brand’ helps make sense of the character and nature of their work as immaterial labour. These two notions take the model well beyond her (there is very little mention of male models here) image, with Wissenger noting (on p 163) that “where and how they shop, eat, get their hair styled, live, vacation and work are all part and parcel of the process by which a model producers his or her image, all consumption practices that are geared towards producing the model’s ‘look’ for the marketplace”. This turn to actor network theory allows Entwistle and Slater to consider the spider’s web of connections that goes into producing each model both as produced and as consumed by those of us who look on and try to be like the images we see, however much many of us think we don’t absorb some of those forms.
The other two stand out chapters for me were Mears’ discussion of being a gaijin model in Japan, most especially her case that ‘the look’ functions as of a client and context specific rental agreement alongside the notion that modelling is a ‘bad job’, in that it is generally low paid, low skill with low education requirements and no benefits while relying on an entrepreneurial, risk-taking workforce. In the other stand-out chapter, Wissenger draws on over ten years fieldwork in the sector to discuss the processes of self-commodification that are the basis of the development and maintenance of ‘the look’ to argue that models should be understood as cultural intermediaries embodying the aesthetic and immaterial labour that is the hall mark of the cultural industries. The final scholarly essay, by Stephanie Sadre-Orafai, debunks the notion that ‘reality TV’ modelling shows are anything like real but more importantly that these shows present and legitimate a specifically neoliberal mode of labour.
This collection is an important contribution not only to explorations of the fashion industries but also for those of us whose work deals with immaterial and aesthetic labour, whose scholarly work relies on industries where bodies are the basic tool of trade (Mears draws a compelling parallel between models, athletes and strippers) and to our understandings of the cultural industries and celebrity more generally. The evidence produced about the fashion industry is important, rich and allows for considerable insights, but the wider points about body work, the production of desire and the practices of consumption in neoliberal economies make this a collection with much wider relevance. The gaps, inevitable in all books, mean it is also only a start.
The collection covers both historical aspects of the ‘creation’ of models and contemporary sociological analyses, including a good range of contributors although with a focus on English language contexts, with the exception of Ashley Mears ethnographic piece dealing with modelling in Japan. Mears is one of two contributors who have made a living from working in the industry (she is now in the sociology department at Boston Uni and author of Pricing Beauty); Patricia Soley-Beltran is the other. The only other chapter that takes us outside a narrowly defined Anglo-American nexus is Margaret Maynard’s exploring the development of fashion modelling in Australia. Entwistle and Wissinger recognise this gap; analyses especially of the major European capitals – Paris & Milan would be good to see – as would further similar work dealing with emerging fashion centres – Shanghai. Dakar, Mumbai, Moscow – that might help make more sense of the global dynamics of labour migration of models; but this is an aside.
The collection effectively debunks notions of a simple narrative of linear development; Elspeth Brown’s US-focussed piece considers four types of model in early 20th century setting – the artist’s model, the cloak or wholesale showroom model, the couturier model/showgirl (the version often have in mind when using the term) and the photographic model as mediating discourses of sexuality. Other historical contributions are, with Maynard, Laila Haidarali on African American models in the late 1940s and 1950s and Soley-Beltran’s counter narrative of glamour as labour.
As useful as these historical pieces are, for my current interests I found the more sociological papers more useful. Entwistle’s essay with Don Slater analysing bodies and their images using a form of actor network theory to argue first that central to understanding the image of the model is making sense of ‘the look’ as an organising concept, and second that considering each model as a ‘brand’ helps make sense of the character and nature of their work as immaterial labour. These two notions take the model well beyond her (there is very little mention of male models here) image, with Wissenger noting (on p 163) that “where and how they shop, eat, get their hair styled, live, vacation and work are all part and parcel of the process by which a model producers his or her image, all consumption practices that are geared towards producing the model’s ‘look’ for the marketplace”. This turn to actor network theory allows Entwistle and Slater to consider the spider’s web of connections that goes into producing each model both as produced and as consumed by those of us who look on and try to be like the images we see, however much many of us think we don’t absorb some of those forms.
The other two stand out chapters for me were Mears’ discussion of being a gaijin model in Japan, most especially her case that ‘the look’ functions as of a client and context specific rental agreement alongside the notion that modelling is a ‘bad job’, in that it is generally low paid, low skill with low education requirements and no benefits while relying on an entrepreneurial, risk-taking workforce. In the other stand-out chapter, Wissenger draws on over ten years fieldwork in the sector to discuss the processes of self-commodification that are the basis of the development and maintenance of ‘the look’ to argue that models should be understood as cultural intermediaries embodying the aesthetic and immaterial labour that is the hall mark of the cultural industries. The final scholarly essay, by Stephanie Sadre-Orafai, debunks the notion that ‘reality TV’ modelling shows are anything like real but more importantly that these shows present and legitimate a specifically neoliberal mode of labour.
This collection is an important contribution not only to explorations of the fashion industries but also for those of us whose work deals with immaterial and aesthetic labour, whose scholarly work relies on industries where bodies are the basic tool of trade (Mears draws a compelling parallel between models, athletes and strippers) and to our understandings of the cultural industries and celebrity more generally. The evidence produced about the fashion industry is important, rich and allows for considerable insights, but the wider points about body work, the production of desire and the practices of consumption in neoliberal economies make this a collection with much wider relevance. The gaps, inevitable in all books, mean it is also only a start.
January 26, 2023
highlight knihy byl vypsanej celej tyra banks monolog z antm
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews