Paola Di Trocchio: Fashion Magazines: Fashion’s Friend or Foe?
Assistant Curator - International Fashion and Textiles
National Gallery of Victoria
Fashion magazines were produced in Europe from the 18th century to distribute fashion ideas throughout the world. In so doing, they controlled conceptions of fashionable styles and provided patterns and models for dressmakers to copy. Fashion magazines existed then, and continue to exist today, in order to communicate and promote designers’ latest collections, fashionable styles, ideals of beauty, attitude and poise1. But are fashion magazines promoting fashion, or destroying it? Is the information they provide sustaining fashion, or encouraging adaptation and copyists who threaten designers original contributions to fashion?
Since the fourteenth century fashion has been dictated to the public by society leaders, such as aristocrats, royalty and currently celebrities, and since the 1950s fashion has also been influenced by street culture and subcultural groups. The proliferation of magazines allowed fashion to be distributed more widely and more quickly, encouraging imitation. By definition fashion relies on multiples, and does not exist in isolation but relies on followers to validate it, but do magazines inappropriately promote designers work as models to copy?
In 1869 Harper’s Bizarre published an image of a Charles Frederick Worth dress, causing it to be copied from St Petersburg to Chicago, without Worth receiving any recognition or financial benefit from the reproductions2. Consequently his design repeatedly appeared in inferior forms, as full knowledge of the garments construction could not be gained simply from an image. This gave rise to unlicensed designs, which Nancy Troy refers to in her text Couture Culture. To deal with this problem, Worth sold models of his dresses to international audiences so that he would receive payment for his designs and so that they could be copied more accurately. Alexander Palmer refers to this system of reproduction in her text Couture and Commerce, which remained a staple part of the fashion industry until the 1960s.
The licensing of Pierre Cardin dresses to a Melbourne manufacturer, Lucas & Co in the 1960s is the subject of my Masters research at RMIT University, Australia. The licensing system aimed to oppose the unsolicited copying that fashion magazines allowed and at times encouraged, to ensure that the designer received a royalty from the copy that was sold.
This paper will look at the ambiguous relationship of fashion magazines towards fashion, as they promote fashion designers and their original designs, while at the same time encourage and enable unsolicited copying by promoting more affordable adaptations. It will look at how licensing aimed to counter this, whether or not licensing was effective, and the ways that fashion magazines dealt with the system of licensing, drawing examples from the relationship between Australian Vogue, Lucas & Co and Pierre Cardin in the 1960s.