Media's Manipulation of the Fashion Industry - Dissertation Example

The essay "Media's Manipulation of the Fashion Industry" talks about Consumerism in Fashion. The magazines’ promotion of designer fashion garments was conditional, complicated and mediated. Fashion media add their own gloss and frame of meaning to the fashion components or raw materials, when representing fashion. Significantly, the work and purpose of fashion media is constrained by the different “traditions and conventions which have defined fashion journalism as a specialist field, shaping what can be said, and in what kind of format”.

Considerable transformations in consumer attitudes, age profiles, and shopping modes, as well as increasing orientation towards lifestyle consumerism, have led to challenges and opportunities for contemporary designers, retailers as well as the fashion media. Business and couture have always been in close partnership, although the economics of the trade have been closely guarded “behind the presentational glamour of seasonal fashion shows”. The revisionist history of couture as composed only of the processes of designing and the making of high fashion apparel is “manipulative, strategic and cynical”.

By not divulging the entire picture, fashion journalists’ accounts function as traps for the naïve reader. The fashion magazines with various journalists and related professionals behind them, “promote and hype only the notion of couture fashion as high art, and as beyond-reality dreams”. The media control the consumers and the industry by endorsing designers as geniuses., and their clothes as the ultimate in creative innovation. The fashion industry’s design flexibility is well known; however its methods of adjusting to economic trends is not revealed.

The industry is “knowing, manipulative and clever, building with vast success on the uniqueness of couture’s sartorial elitism” (White and Griffiths, 2000, p.122). The glossy magazines successfully conceal the industry’s business interests and reinforce the progress of couture companies by avoiding any references to their commercial processes (White and Griffiths, 2000). Fashion journalism is a narrow, closed world consisting of writers, photographers, fashion assistants, contributing editors, and others who share the same ‘fashion world’ as the designers, company directors, press officers, and publicity personnel.

This sector considers itself trivialised and associated with lack of intelligence and substance. A closer relationship with industry is maintained by specialised fields in journalism related to consumer-based activities, based on acquring advertising revenue. This is because industry is the source of both news and revenue, states Tunstall (1971). Thesis Statement: The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the media such as fashion magazines, films, and advertising approaches are used to manipulate the fashion industry, and how they influence consumers.

The fashion magazines, their target markets, and the Chinese and British markets will be compared. Further, the psychological elements behind fashion