New book by Professor Moeran: THE MAGIC of FASHION

The Magic of Fashion

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 ICM Professor of Business Anthroplogy 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 (mainly in the form of designers, but also fashion photographers, magazine editors, hair stylists and make-up artists) who utter magical spells (“Orange is the new black”) 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.” 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.

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 they contribute to and sustain the magic of fashion and its everyday practices.