Study task 5 research, why fashion magazines matter

Why Fashion Magazines Matter

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/02/why-fashion-magazines-matter/385457/

Walk by any magazine rack and undoubtedly, you'll walk by heralded fashion tomes like Vogue, Lucky, W, and more: thick bound copies often belittled for their heavy advertising and high photo-to-writing ratio. Inside, you’ll find waifish, pouting models wearing ridiculously expensive, deliciously bizarre costumes—not clothes—with headlines that seem pithy and shallow: trend forecasts for the season, celebrities posing in designer gowns, tips on how to best flatter the body.
It seems an anonymous writer a decade after the turn of the century felt the same. In a 1911 Atlantic article, she (and this is an assumption on my part, but I will assume the writer is a she) wonders at the oft-pensive look found on many a fashion model's face, the one that seems to look blankly into the distance.

The dearth in this scene of any emotion, any intellectuality, any sense of the human complexities is obvious, and the author takes note of this as she gleefully tears the fashion magazine of her era apart.

In many ways, not much has changed in fashion magazines. There is, after reading the 1911 story, a strange sense of continuity: Fashion magazines continue to feature models in awkward positions boasting uproarious fashions.
But fashion magazines have evolved. Today, they are just as likely to tackle serious events and the social issues of the day as much as showcase the next feathered, ruffled creation. Fashion has become increasingly accessible since the time that this piece was written—it has broadened its vision beyond society girls drowning in money and become a genre that celebrates "street style," "normcore," and being "basic." Fast fashion, while controversial for its practice of reproducing carbon copies of designer duds at a fraction of the cost by using essentially indentured labor in developing countries, has arguably democratized fashion in making the pricey threads featured in the pages of the fashion magazine the anonymous author ridiculed over a century ago affordable.

Fashion magazines have also had to compete against the Internet just like every other print magazine. But they’ve extended their power beyond the starry-eyed clothing connossieur—they're a veritable source for news (see Refinery29's deft commentary on events embedded within its fashion blog design), feminism (Joanna Coles of Seventeen is altering the magazine's focus on sex into a powerful statement on the sexual issues at the forefront of Millennials), and politics (a subject that has been tiptoed around in this realm but has been a welcome, however limited, aspect of recent issues from the industry leaders).