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.