Spellbound by the magic of fashion
(Copyright © 2015 Left Coast Press Inc.)
How do contemporary fashion designers resemble Siberian shamans? Why are cosmetics advertisements structured like South Indian healing rituals? What are the links between celebrities, fame, and Trobriand Island kula ring exchanges? Or between fame, perfume, alchemy, and animistic practices in Siberia?
In The Magic of Fashion: Ritual, Commodity, Glamour anthropologist Brian Moeran shows how fashion―like many other forms of cultural production―makes use of “technologies of enchantment” to create a system that is in fact magical.
“Like art, film, and music, the fashion system employs magicians in the form of designers, but also fashion photographers, magazine editors, hair stylists and make-up artists who utter magical spells and take part in magical rituals (in particular, the biannual collections) to persuade us that what we consider to be ’clothes’ are in fact ‘fashion’,” says Moeran.
In this respect, the fashion world is no different from magical worlds found in the kinds of “primitive” societies studied in the past by anthropologists in Africa, Asia, and Central America.
Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, Marie Claire, and Vogue analyzed
Making use of extensive ethnographic research and content analysis of editorial and advertising material from four international fashion magazines―Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, Marie Claire, and Vogue―published in France, Hong Kong, Japan, the UK and USA, Moeran shows how the four magazines contribute to and sustain the magic of fashion and its everyday practices. It is the first book to analyse fashion, as opposed to women’s, magazines in comparative perspective.
"I think this book will captivate almost every woman in the world, whether she likes fashion or hates it, and charm her into understanding why she feels the way she does," says Moeran.
The book is richly illustrated, with 50 black and white, and eight pages of colour, photographs―many of them provided by the well-known fashion photographers David Slijper and Andrea Klarin.
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Brian Moeran is professor at Department of Intercultural Communication and Management at CBS.
In recent years he has written the book The Business of Creativity - Toward an Anthropology of Worth and together with Bo Christensen edited the book Exploring Creativity: Evaluative Practices in Innovation, Design, and the Arts.
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