Resumen del capítulo

Since the first experiments with the ‘real time’ online transmission of fashion shows at the end of the 2000s, the live stream has become a standard medium of direct-to-consumer fashion show communication. Fashion shows on the ready-to-wear Fashion Month circuit are now routinely live streamed on brand websites, on fashion media and digital fashion film sites, and on host sites such as Fashion Week Online, dedicated to streaming the latest presentations. The fashion show live stream can be situated within an extensive history of fashion show footage mediated to audiences since the popularization of cinema at the beginning of the 20^th century, as well as photographic content and textual accounts in print publications. This chapter provides an overview of historical uses of print and electronic media to disseminate fashion shows and related content as prerecorded or ‘real time’ broadcasts or as still photographs to contextualize contemporary consumer interactions with fashion shows via media interfaces. I locate the fashion show live stream as a remediation of film and television aesthetics (Bolter & Grusin, 2000), describing specific cinematic and commercial techniques and demonstrating how these media have offered (or denied) a measure of democratic access to fashion. The widespread industry use of the fashion show live stream adheres to a condition that Uhlirova describes as

“the new ubiquity of fashion as moving image” thanks to electronic and digital media

affordances (2013, p. 153). A focus on the mediatization of fashion shows rather than images broadly speaking positions live streams as a representative example of the industry’s multifarious uses of electronic and digital media in this decade. The live stream offers consumers an

unprecedented measure of temporal access to fashion shows; furthermore, online media afford brands, intermediaries and consumers tools to transmit, share and access that content across

spectatorship can or should be deemed immediate depends on one’s position in relation to the interface, and that of the camera(s) in relation to the runway performance. Sarah Bay-Cheng observes that the conditions of reception of digital performances or records fluctuate depending on new affordances:

The digital … is always in tension between its fixed and fluid qualities. In part because new modes of technology are always developing, our sense of a particular digital interaction necessarily changes over time even as some of the formal devices … remain the same. The device, game or software that appears so new may, in only a few years, feel sluggish, outmoded, obsolete. While this planned obsolescence of new technology fits perfectly into capitalist business models, such shifts in our participation with the digital record also affect our relation to the digital experience itself. (2010, p. 131) The live stream as a medium has remained somewhat static – a means to transmit content from the performance space to a spectatorship that watches it over a screen-based interface in as instantaneous a timeframe as bandwidths will permit. Fashion companies have capitalized on the creation of new (and portable) devices, applications and features to facilitate more innovative and interactive brand communications. Still, I observe here that the fashion show live stream has evolved into a more cinematic viewing experience rather than a more transparent one, and even more transparent technologies now use filters and other editing features to maintain fashion’s allure. Recent fashion show transmissions have utilized techniques, shots and aesthetics that cinema and television made possible, invoking the modes of spectatorship that these media formats established. Still, while each media is derived from its predecessors, “each demands a different way of attending to the event” (Wissinger, 2013, p. 134). The popularized use of applications such as Twitter’s Periscope and Facebook Live permits brands and intermediaries moreover to stream footage from fashion shows via handheld devices. Despite the presence of cameras, the use of handheld devices to stream content does create a vicarious embodiment between spectator and camera-holder that instantiates what I term a more immediate handheld

perspective or handheld front row perspective. Nonetheless, online spectators’ sense of presence depends on the device-holder’s location in the performance space.

This chapter first outlines media, film and performance-based theories of spectatorship and user positionalities to explore the manner in which electronic media facilitate interaction, and to trouble the notion that ‘real time’ transmission can be described as such. Next, an historical genealogy of fashion shows’ dissemination across print, film, television and online media demonstrates, firstly, that fashion show content explicated fashion trends to consumers several decades before online media’s temporal democratization of fashion, and, secondly, that scholars have traditionally read fashion show footage in terms of its manipulation of processes of gazing, often harnessed in the service of consumer desire. The remainder of the chapter

interrogates the technical and aesthetic qualities of fashion show live streams. I describe the nature of the camera positions and shots and make reference to specific events that have

showcased innovation in the streaming practices in both cinematic techniques and the use of the handheld perspective.

FASHION SHOWS AND PRINT MEDIA

Since the industrial modern period, fashion shows and Fashion Week series have maintained a symbiotic relationship with print media, functioning as the informational conduit via which members of the press are able to witness and report on collections. Both Rocamora (2017) and Auslander (2009b) omit print media from their respective studies of fashion’s mediatization and mediatization’s relation to liveness for reasons of scope: Rocamora to focus on digital media and Auslander on electronic media. Rocamora notes however that if one were to include print media in studies of fashion’s mediatization the first “fashion media” would be the Parisian magazine Le

media “in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” (2017, p. 509). Into the 20^th century, fashion houses relied on coverage from fashion magazines and international press outlets (Evans, 2013, p.

254). Writing on Jeanne Paquin’s US tour, Evans describes that, “In 1914, like today, fashion magazines were integral to an industry which is made of up not only designers but also – of equal weight – manufacturers, buyers, journalists, publicity and sales departments working in tandem like a single organism” (2013, p. 72). The earliest fashion show content to appear in print magazines took the form of professional illustrations sketched from the mannequin parades and circulated as trend information in the major fashion print magazines such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar.^xcvi The first actual fashion photograph feature is considered to be a series of images that Edward Steichen captured of couture gowns for Paul Poiret in 1911, published in April 1911 in the magazine L’Art et Decoration (Niven, 1997, p. 352), while fashion magazines continued to integrate photography into their pages into the subsequent decades.

Print media’s communicative processes prior to and into the Internet era have remained centered on the medium of the fashion show and the immediate conditions of its reception. Case studies of print publications and their fashion show reportage demonstrate how the press

articulates philosophies and ideals – what Brian Moeran terms a “discourse of taste” (2004, p.

53) – that are locatable across national scenes or historical periods but remain centered around class constructs (see also Borelli, 1997; König, 2006; Rocamora, 2001, 2006a, 2006b, 2009).

Print media operate within a state of tension between editorial and commercial dictates and the influence of advertisers, as well as between national and global interests (Moeran, 2006a).

Studies detail editors’ reliance on presentation schedules for material and demonstrate that in certain magazines fashion show reports have come to constitute the most “influential” pieces (König, 2006, p. 216; Moeran, 2006b). The focus of fashion show reports, whether on the

collections or the celebrities that attended, determines how publics perceive collections, fashion houses or even national industries. Angela McRobbie, with reference to Bourdieu’s (1984, 1993) demarcation between high and popular culture, blames the British press for fashion’s “trivialised status” in the post-Thatcher era due to its consecration of certain (male) designers as celebrities (1998, p. 15). Rocamora (2001, 2002) also draws on Bourdieu to compare the concurrent discursive production of fashion in issues of the French newspaper Le Monde and the British newspaper The Guardian from 1996. Rocamora (2001) observes that Le Monde attaches high cultural values to fashion and positions designers in an authorial role, while The Guardian foregrounds celebrities’ presence at Fashion Week and describes collections using competition metaphors. In both instances, the content is intended to arouse public interest in the fashion show as event (Rocamora, 2001, p. 126). Likewise, Anna König (2006) finds that, in the 1990s, British Vogue’s reportage descends into the realm of popular culture with pieces oriented around fashion shows. Fashion’s mediatization has both blurred and exacerbated tensions between high and popular culture, while coverage and criticism have proliferated into multiple discursive registers.

Still, as I will demonstrate, media representations of fashion shows and Fashion Week events are intended to position high fashion and its brands in an elite sociocultural arena.

In addition to textual reportage and commentaries on fashion shows, informational look photographs taken at fashion shows have been essential to print magazines’ trend forecasting and overall informational value. Stationed in a section termed the “media pit” are those professional photographers contracted to snap the frontal “unobstructed head-to-toe shots” of the models in their individual ‘looks’ disseminated in press outlets (Browne, 2016, p. 7). These photographers are installed on risers set up at the end of the runway that the live stream audience does not see as the photograph flashes could present a distraction, and as it offers a reminder of the labour that

creates the fashion image. Within the space, however, these workers are recognizable for their uses of expensive telephoto lenses (see Schuman, 2013). Franziska Bork Petersen (2013) outlines that the location of the media pit and the conventions of the frontal photograph dictate the

models’ stance and frontal, neutral expression (p. 155). The presence of these photographers thus

“determines how the vast majority of fashion consumers see models on the catwalk: directing an indifferent stare at the spectator and strutting propulsively towards her” (Bork Petersen, 2013, p.

155). The press also uses fashion shows to find the garments that will be used for their editorial features, which combine and transform pieces from various collections into an additional series of conceptual photographic statements. The aesthetic trend information contained in these spreads is derived from fashion shows, but the editorial photograph differs from the more factual look photograph in its intention to manifest a more ethereal, idealized world (Geczy &

Karaminas, 2016, p. 16).

Online media has since the late-1990s and 2000s transformed the economies of fashion journalism and the materialities of consumer interaction with fashion content in several respects.

The advent of the fashion blogosphere and independent fashion media sites “decentered” fashion magazines’ industrial primacy both through the sudden influence of non-accredited voices and the hyptertextual nature of the Internet itself, which permits for clicking on multiple possible sites rather than the more linear turning of pages (Rocamora, 2012, pp. 98-99). Citing Bolter’s observation that the Internet “is the remediation of print,” (2001, p. 42), Rocamora reads online fashion websites and blogs as a remediation of print journalism and interfaces, not least because producers tend to ‘borrow’ content from established magazine websites and press outlets to share on their own sites (2012, p. 101). Print magazines for their part, however, “have also remediated fashion blogs by incorporating the latter’s visuals and take on fashion in their own pages,”

lending some credence to new media content and practice and facilitating new multi-media and multi-directional movements of fashion content (Rocamora, 2012, p. 103): a phase in fashion’s mediatization that has exploded into a myriad of transmissions and content forms with the increased use of social media.^xcvii The most fundamental transformation in fashion (and fashion show) reportage arose, however, with the adoption of the fashion show live stream and the increased circulation of online look photographs, which, as stated, irrevocably sped up the timeframe of consumer access to looks from six months to a fraction of a second (see also Rocamora, 2012, p. 97). A brand associate I interviewed for this research describes our

consumption of fashion content as more constant and pervasive but more passive than a period even ten years ago in which consumers had to locate images in physical print magazines (often requiring a trip to the store) and maintain a tactile engagement with media content.^xcviii

Nonetheless, industry sites have continued to remediate elements of print formats. SHOWstudio has dabbled in a form of fashion show illustration, hiring illustrators to contribute their own creative renderings of runway collections for the site and even live streaming the process (Judah, 2017). Vogue’s RUNWAY app lets users swipe through reams of frontal look photographs, read collection reviews published within hours after the presentation and watch archived video clips and animations. I would posit that an app such as RUNWAY still demands a material interaction as users swipe through the look photographs in a linear manner that ‘feels’ reminiscent of the turning of a page, even as the content has been posted within hours of the fashion show, assisting in users’ more active consumption of content that is nonetheless delivered at their convenience.

INTERNET SPECTATORSHIP AND ‘REAL TIME’

Digital technologies and live streaming in particular operate within a history of media formats

Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s concept of remediation outlines that new media formats

“refashion” their predecessors, appropriating elements, interfaces and techniques of earlier media while facilitating new modes of inscription and reception (2000, p. 15). The Internet remediates and combines textual and visual elements of print media as well as the electronic media of film and television (Bolter & Grusin, 2000, p. 15). Like online media, film and television too rendered informational fashion content more accessible to consumers than ever before but still emphasized fashion’s elitist social constructs to commercial ends.

Online fashion show content privileges attendees’ spatial presence as a measure of social and industrial influence and advertises a virtual sense of this inclusion to the spectator as a novel means of brand interaction. The fashion show as an invited event presents a potent demonstration of Auslander’s (2008a) model of matrices of spatial and temporal co-presence between

performer and audience, as such an event elucidates how a mediatized culture holds up the combination of both forms as the most immediate. Indeed, mediatized fashion show footage reveals the extent to which media companies and content producers seek to (or purport to) achieve the same experiential effect. For Bolter and Grusin, one’s experience of immediacy in media use results from the collusion of numerous interfaces: users’ perception of a mediatized or virtual environment as real or seamless is the product of multiple, simultaneous processes that media technologies attempt to efface (2000, p. 9). The use of hypermedia aims to instill a sense of the ‘real’ through a confluence of visible media that, when combined, “create a feeling of fullness, a satiety of experience, which can be taken as reality” (Bolter & Grusin, 2000, p. 53), in a manner that recalls the multisensory operation of Wickstrom’s brandscape. Transparent media work towards the same experience of realness but attempt to negate users’ awareness of technical processes (Bolter & Grusin, 2000, p. 53). Electronic media developers equate users’ perception

of the ‘real’ “in terms of … authentic experience; it is that which would evoke an immediate (and therefore authentic) emotional response” (Bolter & Grusin, 2000, p. 53). Fashion show live streams, broadcast via websites and social media, with a combination of continuous tracking and multi-perspectival shots, operate under the condition of hypermediacy, which, as Bolter &

Grusin articulate, “acknowledges multiple acts of representation and makes them visible … representation is conceived of not as a window onto the world, but rather as ‘windowed’ itself ” (2000, p. 34). Users often watch live streams via interfaces that place other representations within the frame, or, as I will elaborate in the next two chapters, are invited to comment on the fashion shows and/or the collections, necessitating the concurrent opening of other windows or applications. Bay-Cheng (2010) asserts that digital and virtual environments can instill a sense of presence and even interaction with a work: “[P]resence is defined not by physical touch but through avenues of participation. In a digitally connected and networked world, participation creates presence. In a digital context, people do not participate by being there; people are ‘there’

by participating” (p. 130). To consider digital transmissions and records as elements of live performance is to locate “multiple forms of presence, all of which offers us a diversity of knowledges and perspectives that may extend our sense of being there” (Bay-Cheng, 2010, p.

134). Indeed, this approach expands our capacities to examine the interactive and material properties of mediatized fashion show content. The fashion industry capitalizes on this same ideal of virtual presence, promoting consumer access to live streams in terms that indicate that users should feel an absence of interfaces and perceive the event as if seated in the front row.

Crucial to fashion’s discourses of presence and liveness is the use of the term ‘real time’

to describe the speed of transmission, the rate of spectator reception or access, and the overall sense that consumers can watch the fashion show as it happens. In fashion, the idea of ‘real time’

and its immediate sensation is not simply a fabrication but one sold to spectators as the latest (democratized) invention in the transmission of fashion content. However, even within the immediate venue, fashion’s performance and broadcast schedules remain always already in flux.

Drawing from film scholar Mary Ann Doane, Rebecca Schneider problematizes notions of ‘real time’ transmission as “a manufactured instantaneity and immediacy” (2011, p. 93). The notion of the ‘real’ presupposes a historical time that existed prior to mediatization, and effects a “denial”

of its processes (Schneider, 2011, p. 93). The real must be read not as an uncontaminated state but as a construct produced via its opposite, in this case the mediatized (Schneider, 2011, p. 93;

see also Auslander, 2008b). The fashion industry presents consumers’ temporal co-presence at fashion shows as a value-added offer that establishes what Auslander describes as “the sense of a continuous perceptual experience unfolding in real time” (2008b, p. 19). Rocamora differentiates between two connotations of Tomlinson’s cultural condition of immediacy:

[B]oth in the sense that content should reach media users rapidly and in the sense that it should be delivered to them in a seemingly ‘live’ manner, as if media users were really experiencing the event shown to them, as if they were really t/here and now. (2012, p. 65)

Her use of the slash points to the distance and distinction between online spectators’ location and the exclusive elsewhere of the fashion show, as well as to the continued tension between these positionalities.^xcix Brand discourses around fashion shows and purported attempts to replicate the live audience experience over virtual or screen-based interfaces persist despite discrepancies between scheduled and actual start times and potential and often real technical pitfalls.

Numerous phenomena combine in performance environments and in screen-based interfaces to undermine live streams’ claims to ‘real time’ transmission and moreover the idea that there exists a singular, proper temporality at all. Fashion shows are notorious for starting late, often due to packed Fashion Week schedules that require attendees’ rapid travel within

metropolises, and to the late arrivals of important persons, from featured celebrities to top editors without whom the show will not happen (Entwistle & Rocamora, 2006, 2011). Companies instruct spectators to tune in to live streams at a show’s scheduled start time, but spectators often

metropolises, and to the late arrivals of important persons, from featured celebrities to top editors without whom the show will not happen (Entwistle & Rocamora, 2006, 2011). Companies instruct spectators to tune in to live streams at a show’s scheduled start time, but spectators often