Alice Morin
Dr Alice Morin - Postdoc, Media and American Studies
Currently: International Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI), Essen
https://www.kulturwissenschaften.de/person/dr-alice-morin/
Associate member of the Center for Research on the English-speaking World (CREW, EA 4399) - Université Sorbonne Nouvelle
Also an associate member of the Visual Studies Research Institute, University of Southern California
Member of the editorial board of the journal Photographica https://journals.openedition.org/photographica/
Alice Morin’s research explores the media uses of photographs, their production and circulation in a transnational context, with a particular interest in photographically-illustrated magazines in the 20th century.
2020-2023: Postdoctoral Research Associate
Project "Fragmentwanderungen im Medienvergleich / A Media-Based Comparison of Fragment Migration"
Journalliteratur / Philipps-Universität Marburg, Institut für Medienwissenschaft
https://journalliteratur.blogs.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/gb/fragmentwanderungen-im-medienvergleich-fotografien-in-zeitschrift-und-buch-im-20-jahrhundert-tp-5-2/
2019: Scientific advisor – Palais Galliera-Musée de la mode de la Ville de Paris
Exhibition: Vogue Paris, 1920-2020
2014-2018: PhD and Teaching Assistant, American Studies, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3
Visiting Scholar, New York University (2017)
M.A., American Studies, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle
B.A., Art History, École du Louvre
Research Areas: Media History, Periodical Studies, (Fashion) Photography, Visual and Material Culture, American Cultural History
Currently: International Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI), Essen
https://www.kulturwissenschaften.de/person/dr-alice-morin/
Associate member of the Center for Research on the English-speaking World (CREW, EA 4399) - Université Sorbonne Nouvelle
Also an associate member of the Visual Studies Research Institute, University of Southern California
Member of the editorial board of the journal Photographica https://journals.openedition.org/photographica/
Alice Morin’s research explores the media uses of photographs, their production and circulation in a transnational context, with a particular interest in photographically-illustrated magazines in the 20th century.
2020-2023: Postdoctoral Research Associate
Project "Fragmentwanderungen im Medienvergleich / A Media-Based Comparison of Fragment Migration"
Journalliteratur / Philipps-Universität Marburg, Institut für Medienwissenschaft
https://journalliteratur.blogs.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/gb/fragmentwanderungen-im-medienvergleich-fotografien-in-zeitschrift-und-buch-im-20-jahrhundert-tp-5-2/
2019: Scientific advisor – Palais Galliera-Musée de la mode de la Ville de Paris
Exhibition: Vogue Paris, 1920-2020
2014-2018: PhD and Teaching Assistant, American Studies, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3
Visiting Scholar, New York University (2017)
M.A., American Studies, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle
B.A., Art History, École du Louvre
Research Areas: Media History, Periodical Studies, (Fashion) Photography, Visual and Material Culture, American Cultural History
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Journal Issues by Alice Morin
Peer-Reviewed Articles by Alice Morin
Magazines de mode ; stéréotypes ; histoire culturelle ; représentations féminines ; photographie de mode ; discours de mode ; consommation.
Pour une analyse des spécificités et des fonctionnements de ce système, il faudra d’abord dégager ce qui fait son succès - et ce auprès de deux publics, les lecteurs et les annonceurs, alors que les magazines tentent de conserver leur attrait et leur pertinence dans un monde qui évolue, tout comme le(s) public(s) d’ailleurs. Il leur faut d’une part séduire en proposant des formes esthétiques cristallisant un « moment », et assorties d’un discours de la nouveauté, et d’autre part proposer un idéal qui, en raison d’impératifs économiques, est en fait inaccessible. En offrant aux lectrices un jeu de fascination et d’admiration, les magazines se posent en sublimateurs d’un consumérisme dans lequel ils peuvent conserver leur rôle d’ « intercesseurs de féminité ».
En cela et pour cela, les photographies de mode dans les magazines construisent en fait un système propre, autonome, qu’il conviendra aussi d’étudier. On observe de fait un processus d’iconisation de l’image de mode, qu’il nous faut rapprocher du Pop Art et de ses pratiques, mais aussi d’un « reportage » sur une personnalité, un corps, et bien plus sur un imaginaire qui nourrit la fascination d’actualité à l’ère de la Pop Culture. Comme dans d‘autres mouvements, le lecteur est d’ailleurs ainsi invité à participer à l’action, qui a d’autant plus d’impact qu’elle est sérielle et répétée. L’image originale est à la fois renforcée et dissoute dans ses multiples relectures. Bien plus, à travers un système d’intericonicité, les magazines créent un réseau puissant et autonome, dont le but est triple: se positionner par rapport au monde extérieur (avec tous ses événements socio-politiques), avec les lecteurs (par un processus d’identification) et, de manière inconsciente, comme des objets uniques (ce qui justifie l’existence même des supports). Ainsi, ils créent rapidement de nouveaux modèles forts sur lesquels ils peuvent ensuite s’appuyer pendant des décennies, et ce de manière très fiable à travers un réseau propre de réflexivité qui continuera à se nourrir lui-même de manière endémique.
Book Chapters by Alice Morin
been endlessly re- staged in fashion editorials from the 1960s onward (and even before that) – such as the working single girl, the femme fatale or the chic socialite – to whom was granted an enduring iconic quality. Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar represent a platform between fashion’s artistic temptation and the commercial necessities commanding their production. The emergence, repetition and dissemination of such iconic figures through their pages can thus be analysed as an avant- garde- inspired game on stereotypes, ironically detaching itself from the consumer culture that it was embracing – a stance derived from the Pop Art revolution.
The readers’ compulsive fascination for these images was in the process deeply stimulated.
Yet the new norms set by such iconic models proved anything but subversive. My purpose here is to question the making of these fashion iconic figures and to show that they inaugurated new, modern, programmatic narrative and visual discourses, in which the collaboratively constructed narrative ultimately failed to offer readers a space for negotiation.
Organised Conferences by Alice Morin
Organized Panels by Alice Morin
This session will explore photographic works produced at the intersection of fashion and ethnography, that convey an aesthetic and a particular worldview. Our focus will be on images circulating via mainstream magazines--understood here, after Mary Louise Pratt, as « contact zones, » that is as sites of encounter between Euro-American and Global South cultures and aesthetics within the context of unbalanced power relations. We welcome papers located at the critical juncture of fashion studies, media studies and postcolonial studies that interrogate the reciprocal influences of fashion and ethnography as they unfold in a variety of images, be they editorials, advertisements, photographic campaigns or commissioned series, from the 19th century until today.
Talks by Alice Morin
In particular, photographs commissioned by mainstream luxury publications, such as American fashion magazines Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, illustrate collaborative commercial practices. Mobilizing photographers and editors, as well as publishers, stylists, make-up and hair artists, graphic designers and marketers, these images also attest to the ambivalent relationships between their “multiple audiences” of advertisers, industry professionals and readers. Using an interdisciplinary approach informed by art history, cultural history and media studies, this paper proposes to unfold these collaborations and circulations, and the pertaining power relations, in order to expose the ways in which narratives constructed in and around said editorial photographic series constituted a site for all parties involved to negotiate the social, political, cultural and even economic upheavals of the 1960s-1970s period.
First, I intend to shed light on the process of images-making in the context of a big, well-organized magazine, by analyzing a few chosen examples of photographic spreads, whose production was documented. Using the account of several participants (found in their personal papers, autobiographies and in interviews that I have conducted with them), I will show how the practicality of such an editorial system is intertwined with static hierarchies and various agendas. Together, all these parameters shaped different logics of representation, and influenced but also restricted the way Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar visually narrated the world around them, as well as the smaller, more intimate circle of fashion and culture.
Secondly, I will focus on the circulations of the images produced under various forms (exhibitions, artistic reinterpretations, sales of by-products and staging of the commercial work of fashion photography in documentaries and popular culture). By observing how these circulations were (sometimes simultaneously) encouraged, tolerated, ignored or censored, I will demonstrate how magazines became cultural references, institutions even, able in the 1960s-1970s to challenge established views on collaboration, art, social dialogue and disruption – as well as to cement them.
In-depth examination of the editorial productions from the early 1960s to the late 1980s of Vogue (a high end periodical with ambitious art direction, seemingly unlimited means and a content growingly democratized) and Andy Warhol’s Interview (a more hybrid, underground object, centered on transcripts of interviews with various personalities but also on innovative artwork) shows how similar subjects can be framed very differently depending on the layout, the paratext and several other editorial choices.
This paper unfolds the conclusions of such a case study: first, that the deep intertwining between images, texts (paratexts as well as articles) and graphic design in fashion magazines is the result of the collaboration between networks of people, often evolving in the same circles, who shape the final result. Editors, art directors, photographers, stylists, writers and publishers all carry a personal vision and different convictions—as evidenced in past issues but also through the examination of personal papers, interviews and memoirs—, and the negotiations between them underlie the editorial (often narrative ) content, with all the subtlety of its many layers of meaning.
Secondly, the general critical consensus on the fashion press seems to be that fashion magazines sustain both an aesthetic avant-garde and a political and social status quo . This duality is deeply rooted in the period’s upheavals, caught between social movements and a still vivid Cold War in which consumerism and “the ideal West “became a national matter . My analyzis of the content of Vogue and Interview in this light, and against the current critical background, brings to light how much this discourse is determined by the relationship between text and images in the magazine’s pages. This is all the more striking that, when cut from this context and ‘reworded’—as it tends to be the case, for instance in large, monographic exhibitions since the 1970s —fashion photographs take up an entirely different meaning, one that smooths out these very tensions which make them unique.
Magazines de mode ; stéréotypes ; histoire culturelle ; représentations féminines ; photographie de mode ; discours de mode ; consommation.
Pour une analyse des spécificités et des fonctionnements de ce système, il faudra d’abord dégager ce qui fait son succès - et ce auprès de deux publics, les lecteurs et les annonceurs, alors que les magazines tentent de conserver leur attrait et leur pertinence dans un monde qui évolue, tout comme le(s) public(s) d’ailleurs. Il leur faut d’une part séduire en proposant des formes esthétiques cristallisant un « moment », et assorties d’un discours de la nouveauté, et d’autre part proposer un idéal qui, en raison d’impératifs économiques, est en fait inaccessible. En offrant aux lectrices un jeu de fascination et d’admiration, les magazines se posent en sublimateurs d’un consumérisme dans lequel ils peuvent conserver leur rôle d’ « intercesseurs de féminité ».
En cela et pour cela, les photographies de mode dans les magazines construisent en fait un système propre, autonome, qu’il conviendra aussi d’étudier. On observe de fait un processus d’iconisation de l’image de mode, qu’il nous faut rapprocher du Pop Art et de ses pratiques, mais aussi d’un « reportage » sur une personnalité, un corps, et bien plus sur un imaginaire qui nourrit la fascination d’actualité à l’ère de la Pop Culture. Comme dans d‘autres mouvements, le lecteur est d’ailleurs ainsi invité à participer à l’action, qui a d’autant plus d’impact qu’elle est sérielle et répétée. L’image originale est à la fois renforcée et dissoute dans ses multiples relectures. Bien plus, à travers un système d’intericonicité, les magazines créent un réseau puissant et autonome, dont le but est triple: se positionner par rapport au monde extérieur (avec tous ses événements socio-politiques), avec les lecteurs (par un processus d’identification) et, de manière inconsciente, comme des objets uniques (ce qui justifie l’existence même des supports). Ainsi, ils créent rapidement de nouveaux modèles forts sur lesquels ils peuvent ensuite s’appuyer pendant des décennies, et ce de manière très fiable à travers un réseau propre de réflexivité qui continuera à se nourrir lui-même de manière endémique.
been endlessly re- staged in fashion editorials from the 1960s onward (and even before that) – such as the working single girl, the femme fatale or the chic socialite – to whom was granted an enduring iconic quality. Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar represent a platform between fashion’s artistic temptation and the commercial necessities commanding their production. The emergence, repetition and dissemination of such iconic figures through their pages can thus be analysed as an avant- garde- inspired game on stereotypes, ironically detaching itself from the consumer culture that it was embracing – a stance derived from the Pop Art revolution.
The readers’ compulsive fascination for these images was in the process deeply stimulated.
Yet the new norms set by such iconic models proved anything but subversive. My purpose here is to question the making of these fashion iconic figures and to show that they inaugurated new, modern, programmatic narrative and visual discourses, in which the collaboratively constructed narrative ultimately failed to offer readers a space for negotiation.
This session will explore photographic works produced at the intersection of fashion and ethnography, that convey an aesthetic and a particular worldview. Our focus will be on images circulating via mainstream magazines--understood here, after Mary Louise Pratt, as « contact zones, » that is as sites of encounter between Euro-American and Global South cultures and aesthetics within the context of unbalanced power relations. We welcome papers located at the critical juncture of fashion studies, media studies and postcolonial studies that interrogate the reciprocal influences of fashion and ethnography as they unfold in a variety of images, be they editorials, advertisements, photographic campaigns or commissioned series, from the 19th century until today.
In particular, photographs commissioned by mainstream luxury publications, such as American fashion magazines Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, illustrate collaborative commercial practices. Mobilizing photographers and editors, as well as publishers, stylists, make-up and hair artists, graphic designers and marketers, these images also attest to the ambivalent relationships between their “multiple audiences” of advertisers, industry professionals and readers. Using an interdisciplinary approach informed by art history, cultural history and media studies, this paper proposes to unfold these collaborations and circulations, and the pertaining power relations, in order to expose the ways in which narratives constructed in and around said editorial photographic series constituted a site for all parties involved to negotiate the social, political, cultural and even economic upheavals of the 1960s-1970s period.
First, I intend to shed light on the process of images-making in the context of a big, well-organized magazine, by analyzing a few chosen examples of photographic spreads, whose production was documented. Using the account of several participants (found in their personal papers, autobiographies and in interviews that I have conducted with them), I will show how the practicality of such an editorial system is intertwined with static hierarchies and various agendas. Together, all these parameters shaped different logics of representation, and influenced but also restricted the way Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar visually narrated the world around them, as well as the smaller, more intimate circle of fashion and culture.
Secondly, I will focus on the circulations of the images produced under various forms (exhibitions, artistic reinterpretations, sales of by-products and staging of the commercial work of fashion photography in documentaries and popular culture). By observing how these circulations were (sometimes simultaneously) encouraged, tolerated, ignored or censored, I will demonstrate how magazines became cultural references, institutions even, able in the 1960s-1970s to challenge established views on collaboration, art, social dialogue and disruption – as well as to cement them.
In-depth examination of the editorial productions from the early 1960s to the late 1980s of Vogue (a high end periodical with ambitious art direction, seemingly unlimited means and a content growingly democratized) and Andy Warhol’s Interview (a more hybrid, underground object, centered on transcripts of interviews with various personalities but also on innovative artwork) shows how similar subjects can be framed very differently depending on the layout, the paratext and several other editorial choices.
This paper unfolds the conclusions of such a case study: first, that the deep intertwining between images, texts (paratexts as well as articles) and graphic design in fashion magazines is the result of the collaboration between networks of people, often evolving in the same circles, who shape the final result. Editors, art directors, photographers, stylists, writers and publishers all carry a personal vision and different convictions—as evidenced in past issues but also through the examination of personal papers, interviews and memoirs—, and the negotiations between them underlie the editorial (often narrative ) content, with all the subtlety of its many layers of meaning.
Secondly, the general critical consensus on the fashion press seems to be that fashion magazines sustain both an aesthetic avant-garde and a political and social status quo . This duality is deeply rooted in the period’s upheavals, caught between social movements and a still vivid Cold War in which consumerism and “the ideal West “became a national matter . My analyzis of the content of Vogue and Interview in this light, and against the current critical background, brings to light how much this discourse is determined by the relationship between text and images in the magazine’s pages. This is all the more striking that, when cut from this context and ‘reworded’—as it tends to be the case, for instance in large, monographic exhibitions since the 1970s —fashion photographs take up an entirely different meaning, one that smooths out these very tensions which make them unique.
Prominent U.S. publication Vogue was a pioneer in establishing the practice during the 1930s. A case study, rooted in social and cultural history, looking at the magazine in the 1960s’ and 1970s’ context of social and cultural unrest shows that such hierarchies were challenged, but persisted.
This paper first observes, using editors and publishers’ personal papers and memoirs as well as oral history, the making of editorial images. Internal hierarchies and power relations (in terms of class, gender and race) were central to these production processes. Adaptable yet durable, these constraining fluxes maintained a balance between productivity and innovation, profitably channeling intrinsic tensions throughout troubled times. Such a modus operandi is mirrored by visual content: a visual narrative of creativity and artistry was promoted in Vogue’s pages, dissimulating the perpetuation of a political, socio-economic and cultural imperative of consumerism which represented an underplayed, yet core activity of magazine production. Finally, an examination of such content’s circulation in the 1970s reveals how a promotion of editorial productions (through exhibitions organized with various institutions, but also through the sale of by-products such as prints or coffee-table books, amongst other examples) reinforced these hierarchies and staged them, putting emphasis on some actors while relegating some into oblivion. As this paper will conclude, all these elements were successfully woven into an editorial business system whose tensions made it effective.
Rebecca Arnold pointed fear as a driving element behind fashion and fashion images’ innovativeness all along the 20th century (Arnold 2002). The 1940s saw, in a context of postwar consumerism, prosperity and socio-political consensus, the rise of a specifically American fashion. American fashion first imposed itself as a business system, with the boom of ready-to-wear. Then it became a creative force to be reckoned with, through the emergence and promotion of American designers such as Betsey Johnson, operating in boutiques, American figures of the counter-culture such as Grace Slick and Janis Joplin, who had their own stylists, and, later, international household names such as Halston or Bill Blass, all giving birth to a proper American fashion scene. These upheavals to a decades-old system over which Europe, and especially Paris, had been reigning, took place while the US were under pressure from within, with political protests and social movements, and from the outside, with a Cold War still in its hot phase.
The two most prominent American fashion magazines, Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, championed this American scene in an enthusiastic, albeit ambivalent way. Indeed, in the 1960s and 1970s, when American fashion confirmed its prime place in their pages and in international commerce networks, the tension between fantasy and fear was palpable in their photographic productions as well as in the accompanying texts. This paper proposes a case study of how both elements operate in mirroring ways, at the same time answering and feeding each other in these magazines’ content.
First, it examines how the climate of panic in the 1960s, due to socio-cultural uncertainty and unrest and a still vivid nuclear threat, was met with unabashed inventiveness in clothing and in their staging. It particularly focuses on the buoyant, excessive photographic series and on the articles and paratext along them, which came out as remarkably future-oriented. This ensemble, which can be seen as a form of escapism, put forth, for the first time, a carefully crafted “world of fashion”. Detached from realities and prone to agitation, sometimes to cruelty, this closed circle of fashion avant-garde proved to be fertile ground for the interweaving of fantasy and fear, whether in the leitmotivs it favored or in the ways it has itself been represented since.
Secondly, this paper turns to the 1970s and observes how the status quo was progressively re-established in images and in text, in photographs and articles. Both embraced a more bourgeois, smoother aesthetic and discourse, while the casual, practical and glamourous “American style” was at its peak. However, such a toned-down shift still allowed for a fruitful dialogue between fear and creativity, with fear (of the social changes operated but also driven by the necessity to maintain the political, socio-economic and cultural model of consumerism) paradoxically making way for new modes of expressions, be it in writing or photographic practices, while fantasy manifested itself in refined lifestyles. Of peculiar interest is a new sensitivity, manifested through a more intimate way of staging preoccupied with subtle details, through varied yet still unattainable women role models, as well as through injunctive and concerned articles.
Thus, this paper will look closely into the historical intertwining of fear and fantasy, of external and internal pressures, of images and text, of macro-history and cultural aesthetic productions, to conclude to a productive tension at the core of fashion images-making in context. The fact that this is especially palpable in moments of fear makes this modus operandi all the more topical today.
Interestingly, both magazines’ subjects on the city life were often the same (celebrities portraits of social figures, artistic gatherings or various social events), only their treatment differed thoroughly. In both cases however, dress and the vision of the American fashion industry they conveyed represented a way of passing, from one neighborhood to the other, from one social level to another, from one register of discourse to another. It is the purpose of this paper to built a mirroring case study between Vogue and Interview to appreciate the complex (sometimes joyous, sometimes fascinated, sometimes militant) vision of the city that they offer via fashion—either through reporting it or reimagining it through grand photographic mises-en-scènes.
C’est dans les années 1960, alors que les revendications des mouvements sociaux d’un côté comme de l’autre de l’Atlantique pointent du doigt une inégalité à la fois symbolique et très réelle, que ce manque de représentativité devient problématique. Les réponses aux critiques qui s’ensuivent ne sont cependant pas les mêmes en France et aux Etats-Unis, deux pays dont le rapport à leurs minorités sont très différents.
Distinguant bien, comme c’était le cas à l’époque, les mannequins podiums (qui défilent lors des présentations) des mannequins photos (qui incarnent les tendances dans les pages des magazines mais aussi dans les publicités), et en se concentrant sur ces derniers, qui portent d’importants enjeux de représentations lisibles aussi dans leur longévité, cette communication étudie les parcours de mannequins noires qui les font souvent évoluer entre la France et les Etats-Unis.
Il s’agira notamment d’observer la place de ces femmes dans les magazines féminins dits mainstream, présentant une autre personnification d’un idéal pourtant peu flexible dans une industrie majoritairement blanche. Dans ces pages se dessine ainsi clairement une évolution entre les années 1950, alors que ces magazines assuraient un certain status quo dans lequel seules les mannequins au teint plus clair, pouvant passer pour bronzées, pouvaient s’intégrer, jusqu’aux années 1990, période auto-proclamée de la diversité ethnique qui a vu triompher, parmi les supermodels, la très foncée Naomi Campbell - avant que le digital ne redistribue les cartes sans réellement résoudre le problème.
Cette intervention cherchera donc aussi à questionner l’apparente non-évolution de la place de ces travailleuses dont le corps prend une dimension éminemment emblématique et sociale, en rappelant d’abord comment deux marchés de la beauté parallèles se sont établis aux Etats-Unis, l’un noir, l’autre blanc, qui cohabitaient de manière hermétique, dans une relation de domination visuelle et économique du second alors même que le premier croissait jusqu’à une dimension non-négligeable.
Elle étudiera ensuite la manière dont les mannequins noires s’invitent dans les pages des magazines. Les futurs célèbres mannequins noires de la fin des années 1960 travaillent souvent d’abord en Europe (à Paris en particulier, où elles sont plus acceptées), avant de pouvoir s’insérer dans l’espace public d’une Amérique de plus en plus officiellement multiculturelle, et où les différences sont en fait lissées par la consommation de masse - à New York, où elles collaboreront d’abord avec des couturiers français et des photographes cosmopolites. Il s’agira aussi d’examiner les enjeux politiques, socio-économiques et culturels d’un tel parcours, souvent long, compliqué, et qui s’inscrit rarement dans la durée.
Une telle étude de cas s’appuiera sur l’analyse rigoureuse d’un corpus de sources primaires composé de magazines américains (Vogue US, Harper’s Bazaar, Cosmopolitan mis face à face avec des magazines réservés aux noirs comme Ebony mais aussi avec des titres français comme ELLE) mais aussi de témoignages de mannequins, ou d’entretiens réalisés avec des photographes, pour conclure que la négociation des normes rigides de la beauté, quand elle est réussie, est souvent liée à des questions de personnalité - ce qui renvoie par ailleurs à une longue tradition de représentation des noirs - et ne peut se faire qu’au prix de compromis avec des organes de presse fermement implantés et très organisés - les conventions de représentation révélant généralement une grande pauvreté de rôles aux mannequins noires, et restreinte à certaines catégories d’images (mettant en scène la beauté, la lingerie, etc.) - comme l’illustre parfaitement l’exemple du traitement de l’afro dans la presse, tour à tour menaçante, exaltée puis récupérée.
Apparemment libérés par le détour cosmopolite et l’acceptation des bouleversements sociaux impulsés par le Mouvement pour les Droits Civiques, les magazines de mode américains reflètent en fait des valeurs traditionnelles américaines, et, par extension, capitalistes. Tous les corps qui ne correspondent pas à cet idéal (en termes de race, mais aussi de classe ou d’âge) sont effacés ou traités de manière marginale, exoticisés, sur-esthétisés, voire moqués… Il y a là une tension fondamentale, à la fois visuelle et discursive, nationale et historiographique, dont cette communication souhaite déplier les mécanismes dans une perspective transdisciplinaire.
My approach for this project is thus transdiciplinary, as is the field of fashion research itself. I intend to examine the sociopolitical, economic, cultural contexts in which magazines photographs operated; to understand their contexts of production and the people who participated in them; to analyze their content in order to identify the visual and textual discourses they produce—versus the ones presiding over their fabrication. To unfurl such a creative enterprise, I use, besides a vast array of secondary sources from diverse disciplinary fields, a certain number of various primary sources, which require archive work (on three publications, Vogue US, Harper’s Bazaar US, Warhol’s Interview); fieldwork (interviews, personal papers’ processing); and a balance between quantitative and qualitative analysis. How do they articulate, and answer each other? Are they sufficient to give a complete rendering of the collaborative and complex processes resulting in images which are, at core, torn between aesthetic and commercial concerns?
By looking at major editorial series, I explore how these images stand out as "contact zones" between a highly collaborative production process and their receptions, and how their function is also one of negotiation with regards to its context.
A close analysis of the conditions of production, the content and the circulations of these images demonstrates that magazines express undeniable conservatism through the perpetuation of a mainstream norm. However, as this norm constantly changes on the surface, I argue that conditions regularly emerge for it to be negotiated. An attentive study of the tensions and compromises unfolding in the « uncertain moments » that characterize the period running from the 1960s through the 1980s demonstrates the existence of a powerful system. Structured around a coherent and hermetic narrative, it proves indeed hard to challenge. Yet, as this thesis argues, the ensemble of editorial fashion images homogenized by these long-term processes is in fact varied and diverse. If these images construct models, they also offer counter-models, counter- narratives and counter-points. All these possibilities converge into a strict but agile framework, firmly oriented by its producers but adaptable, even though its subversive potential is only realized at the margins.
This system—structured around a powerful format—is highly restrictive yet it still performs a constant balancing act between conflicting tensions and goals, fueled by and unfolded in the fashion images at its core.
Key words: american magazines; Vogue; Harper’s Bazaar; Interview; 1960s – 1980s; collaborations; narratives; fashion editorials; fashion spreads; images of women; negociations; norms; fashion press; editorial system; tensions.