Documenting Fashion

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.

Elena Caoduro is Lecturer in Media Analysis at Queen's University Belfast, UK. She is the co-editor of Mediated Terrorism in the 21st century (with Karen Ritzenhoff and Karen Randell, 2021). She has previously published on nostalgia, cultural memory, vintage media and fashion films in journals, such as Comunicazioni Sociali, NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, and Cinémas Revue d'études cinématographiques.

Boel Ulfsdotter is Reader in Film and Media Studies at Gothenburg University, Sweden. Ulfsdotter has recently published articles in International Journal of Fashion Studies (2021) and Journal of Film, Fashion & Consumption (2022). Additionally, she has published the twin volumes Female Authorship and the Documentary Image: Theory, Practice and Aesthetics, and Female Agency and Documentary Strategies: Subjectivities, Identity, and Activism (2018) with Edinburgh University Press. Ulfsdotter is a formally trained dressmaker, and freelance fashion and visual arts critic.