Collaboration, competition and conflict: The collective labour of fashion photography at US Vogue (1940–42)

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-211 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marlène Van de Casteele
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
New York ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Media Industry ◽  
Fashion Industry ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Fashion Photography ◽  
Artistic Directors ◽  
Conde Nast

While the figure of the fashion photographer has been widely discussed, little has been written on image-making as a collective endeavour. Fashion photography indeed results from technical innovations, publishing strategies, editorial policies, behind-the-scenes negotiations and, ultimately, decision-making. This article analyses ‘The Condé Nast Papers’ – a series of internal documents held at the Condé Nast archives in New York – together with US Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar’s editorials and covers to explore how fashion photographs resulted from the collective labour of photographers, editors, artistic directors and many others in the early 1940s. Through these unique historical sources, this article gives a voice to the workers involved in the making of fashion images and shows how decision-making and creativity were distributed across occupations. It also unpacks the negotiations, arbitrations and power relations that underpinned work relations at US Vogue, showing the collaboration, competition and conflict between the different actors. Drawing on art sociologist Howard Becker’s concept of ‘art worlds’ while combining methods from fashion history and visual and material culture, I question the respective status of the multiple authors involved in this activity and the conventions of fashion image-making. In doing so, I argue that fashion photographs are the product of the interactions of a multitude of workers who are embedded in the power structures of the fashion media industry, and whose collective labour is made invisible. My goal is to rethink the ways in which collective labour has been evidenced and produced in the fashion industry.

Queer insurgency: Slava Mogutin and the politics of camp

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 141-161
Author(s):  
Graham H. Roberts
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Visual Analysis ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Fashion Industry ◽  
Analysis Methodology ◽  
American Artist ◽  
Fashion Photography ◽  
Political Challenge ◽  
Political Form

The subject of this article is Russo-American artist Slava Mogutin. A close associate of Gosha Rubchinskiy and Lotta Volkova, Mogutin has been based in New York since 1995. While he originally shot to fame as a poet and novelist, Mogutin is today better known as a performance artist, filmmaker and photographer. The aim of my article is to locate Mogutin, and in particular his fashion photography, within current debates around the representation of masculinity and the construction of masculine subjectivity/-ies. More specifically, using a visual analysis methodology, I analyse the camp aesthetics of Mogutin’s fashion imagery. In a number of ways, Mogutin’s camp aesthetic raises questions about displacement and identity, the clash between individual desires and social norms and – as he puts it – ‘what it means to be a young man in the modern world’. It also constitutes an avowedly political challenge, not just to the state-sponsored homophobia and heteronormativity of Mogutin’s native Russia but also to the identity politics underpinning today’s fashion industry. I conclude by suggesting that Mogutin’s openly political form of camp might pose a challenge to the traditional Sontagian view of camp as apolitical.

scholarly journals Fashion/Photo/Film: The Intertextual Discourse of Funny Face (1956)

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-33
Author(s):  
Paul Jobling
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Costume Design ◽  
Dual Process ◽  
Fashion Industry ◽  
Cultural Leadership ◽  
Art And Design ◽  
Fashion Photography ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Relationship Of

In this paper I mobilize Funny Face (dir. Stanley Donen, 1956) to examine the intertextual nexus between fashion, fashion photography, and film. Set in New York City and Paris, with costume design by Hubert de Givenchy and Edith Head, the film is a latter day telling of the Pygmalion myth, such that photographer Dick Avery (Fred Astaire) and Maggie Prescott (Kay Thompson), the dictatorial Fashion Editor of Quality, take up the challenge of converting Jo Stockton (Audrey Hepburn), whom they regard as an unprepossessing bookstore intellectual, into a top model. Thus I analyze how a film that is more generally regarded as a benchmark in the Hollywood musical for its exuberant use of colour and songs is, more particularly, a cinematic locus for both the mediation and mediatization of fashionable identities. To this end, I assess how the film elaborates the power of the fashion industry as a matter of social practice in regards to Foucauldian discourse and the related concept of the énoncé, or event/statement. Thus I evince I two events/statements — “Think Pink!” and “Bonjour Paris” — to discuss in particular the relationship of style to national identities and the need or desire for America to assert cultural leadership in fashion photography, art, and design over France in the context of 1950s Cold War politics. By comparison, I enlist the statements, “Take the Picture!” and “A Bird of Paradise,” to examine respectively the dynamic of looking/gazing between the fashion photographer and designer and their (in this case) female models, the nexus between star designing, clothing, and gender identity, and what Foucault calls assujetissement — subjection — which connotes the dual process of Jo’s subordination as well as the act of her becoming or “being made” a subject according to a system of power.

Women in Power and Decision making Positions : Conditions and Restraints

1970 ◽  
pp. 53-57
Author(s):  
Azza Charara Baydoun
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Political Participation ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Decision Making Process ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Policies And Procedures ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Status ◽  
Slow Progress

Women today are considered to be outside the political and administrative power structures and their participation in the decision-making process is non-existent. As far as their participation in the political life is concerned they are still on the margins. The existence of patriarchal society in Lebanon as well as the absence of governmental policies and procedures that aim at helping women and enhancing their political participation has made it very difficult for women to be accepted as leaders and to be granted votes in elections (UNIFEM, 2002).This above quote is taken from a report that was prepared to assess the progress made regarding the status of Lebanese women both on the social and governmental levels in light of the Beijing Platform for Action – the name given to the provisions of the Fourth Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995. The above quote describes the slow progress achieved by Lebanese women in view of the ambitious goal that requires that the proportion of women occupying administrative or political positions in Lebanon should reach 30 percent of thetotal by the year 2005!

Book Reviews

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-122
Author(s):  
Book Reviews
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Mexican Immigrants ◽  
Silicon Valley ◽  
Harvard University ◽  
University Of California ◽  
Street Vendors ◽  
Missing Link ◽  
Transit Migration

Janitors, Street Vendors, and Activists: The Lives of Mexican Immigrants in Silicon Valley by Christian Zlolniski Berkeley, CA, USA: University of California Press, 2006 ISBN 0520246438, 249 pp.The Archaeology of Xenitia: Greek Immigration and Material Culture Ed. by Kostis Kourelis Athens: Gennadius Library, 2008 ISBN 978-960-86960-6-8, 104 pp.  Transit Migration: The Missing Link between Emigration and Settlement by Aspasia Papadopoulou-Kourkoula New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008 ISBN 0-230-55533-0, 177 pp.How Professors Think: Inside The Curious World of Academic Judgment, 1st Edition by Michele Lamont Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009 ISBN: 978-0674032668, 336 pp.

Anthropologic Relationships among Prehistoric Northeastern Amerindians

1980 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-159
Author(s):  
Edward F. Harris ◽  
Nicholas F. Bellantoni
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Gene Flow ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
New England ◽  
Cultural Barriers ◽  
Group Differences ◽  
Phenetic Analysis ◽  
Trade Relationships ◽  
Good Agreement

Archaeologically defined inter-group differences in the Northeast subarea ate assessed with a phenetic analysis of published craniometric information. Spatial distinctions in the material culture are in good agreement with those defined by the cranial metrics. The fundamental dichotomy, between the Ontario Iroquois and the eastern grouping of New York and New England, suggests a long-term dissociation between these two groups relative to their ecologic adaptations, trade relationships, trait-list associations, and natural and cultural barriers to gene flow.

Judy Jaffe-Schagen, Having and Belonging: Homes and Museums in Israel. New York: Berghahn Books, 2016. x + 221 pp.

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Minority Groups ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Multicultural Society ◽  
Melting Pot ◽  
Ethiopian Jews ◽  
State Of Israel

This chapter reviews the book Having and Belonging: Homes and Museums in Israel (2016), by Judy Jaffe-Schagen. In Having and Belonging, Jaffe-Schagen explores the connection between identity, material culture, and location. Focusing on eight cases involving Chabad, religious Zionists, Moroccan Jews, Iraqi Jews, Ethiopian Jews, Russian Jews, Christian Arabs, and Muslim Arabs, the book shows how various minority groups in Israel are represented through objects and material culture in homes and museums. According to Jaffe-Schagen, in the politicized cultural landscape of borderless Israel, location not only affects the interplay between objects and people but can also provide important insights about citizenship. Her main argument is that the nation-state of Israel is not a multicultural society because it has failed to serve as a cultural “melting pot” for the various immigration groups.

“Little Plants in the Country”: Henry Ford's Village Industries and the Beginning of Decentralized Technology in Modern America

Prospects ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 181-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
Howard P. Segal
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
New York ◽  
Information Processing ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
New York Times ◽  
The United States ◽  
Physical Proximity ◽  
The World ◽  
Word Processors

“Technology Spurs Decentralization Across the Country.” So reads a 1984 New York Times article on real-estate trends in the United States. The contemporary revolution in information processing and transmittal now allows large businesses and other institutions to disperse their offices and other facilities across the country, even across the world, without loss of the policy- and decision-making abilities formerly requiring regular physical proximity. Thanks to computers, word processors, and the like, decentralization has become a fact of life in America and other highly technological societies.

Service decision-making processes at three New York state cooperative public library systems

2014 ◽  
Vol 35 (6/7) ◽  
pp. 418-432
Author(s):  
Xiaoai Ren
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
New York ◽  
New York State ◽  
Public Library ◽  
Organizational Structures ◽  
Annual Reports ◽  
Content Type ◽  
York State ◽  
Decision Making Processes ◽  
And Cluster Analysis

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to look at the organizational structure and service provisions of cooperative public library systems in New York State. The study also seeks to ask questions of how cooperative public library systems decide what services to provide. Design/methodology/approach – Descriptive statistics, factor analysis and cluster analysis were applied on New York State public library systems’ 2008 annual reports to generate quantitative profiles of public library systems and their service transactions. Three cooperative public library systems displaying different service features were purposefully selected for further study of their service decision-making processes. The face-to-face and phone interviews were adopted in the study. Findings – Research findings from this study provide information on specific service variations across cooperative public library systems. The findings also provide differences of service decision-making processes in addition to the factors that might cause these differences. Originality/value – This study adds knowledge of public library systems’ management and organizational structures, therefore fills a knowledge gap on public library systems. It can also serve as the baseline for future studies using newer annual report data and therefore to study the changing roles and services of cooperative public library systems in New York State.

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