Tuesday 19 November 2013

Globalisation and Global Fashion Media - sink or swim?




Consistent with other examples of globalisation, the 21st century has seen fashion media transform under the pressures of economic and digital trends. Flew defines globalisation as the erasing of geographical boundaries, allowing human relationships, culture, business, politics, economics, trade and military activity to transcend national and regional borders (Flew, 2013.)  In a new media sense, time-space compression, facilitated by the Internet and globalization as a bi-product allows instantaneous access to communication networks, the interconnectedness of our global community and the sensation of our world becoming a smaller place.

Particularly in fashion media, globalisation is hastening the emergence of sub-cultures and need for reader-specific content, irrespective of geographic relationship. “Blue jeans, T-shirts, athletic shoes and base ball caps adorn bodies everywhere from Manhattan to villages in Africa,” (Kaiser, 1999). When loyal creative media subscribers have worldwide access to the Internet, they no longer rely on their fashion bibles to dictate trends. Instead, they look to street style bloggers and fashion forward content generators particularly those outside their national sphere. Perhaps its culture curiosity, or perhaps it’s the insatiable thirst for to-the-minute trends, but with their fashion said to be ahead 2 seasons of ours, Australian media has lost 60% of its readership to European publications (ACP, 2012).

As a feature of our globalising society, readers don’t care about region specific content anymore. Fashion homogeneity has created space for the international creative media market, whose production no longer requires local teams – one international issue covers all bases. Prolific blogger Tiany Kiriloff of Belmondo comments that even Condé Nast’s flagship French Vogue has lost its je ne sais quoi through a integration of domestic and local markets, intensification of competition, a high degree of imitation, and a focus on international e-commerce.

However, it is also noted that exposure to international trends has increased the prevalence of global fashion sub-cultures like Harajuku (Smiers, 2003). “This tendency toward both increased variety within geographic locations and a homogenizing effect across locations represents a global paradox,” making it increasingly difficult to create reader-specific content (San Cartier).

To add salt to these wounds, principle photographer Scott Schuman said the speed of publication is the key downfall in print media.  In the fickle fashion world, global competition relies on to-the-minute news. It’s a prime commodity – one that magazines and even e-Zines struggle to compete for (The Satorialist’s guide to Fashion Journalism, 2009). 

Even designers understand this; the live stream of Alexander McQueen’s Spring/Summer2010 collection gained a YouTube audience of over 1.5 million viewers, opening the doors of exclusive events to regular women similar to Rebecca Minkoff’s SS 2014, which was also Live Streamed.



Womens’ link to fashion - the media – have subsequently lost its monopolistic hold on current trends. Readers were sharing their personal trend reports, essentially stealing their content before fashion editors had a chance to sit down and write it.

This shift to cross-platform distribution facilitates a new journalistic experience, yet with this comes new challenges from each step in the chain of production. Amy Creasey, a client activation advisor says that for luxury brand advertisers, digital media is an easier way to reach target fashion communities. Expensive 2-page glossy spreads reach a limited audience, and can be substituted by sending prolific bloggers a satisfying incentive – whether it be free products or VIP entitlements. The free publicity proves to be more effective for international e-commerce markets (Uche. 2007.). However, this shift is fatal for fashion media’s prime revenue source – advertising.

Publications, however, are fighting with ferocity to stay relevant. The American Journalism Review sees “magazines’ current passion for blogging as fueling a vigorous, industry-wide debate about everything from staffing to sourcing, from standards to liability” (Nash, 2007). They have begun to leverage their brand by iconising the faces behind the content (for example, Anna Wintour and Grace Coddington) as an attempt to connect. In terms of advertising, luxury brands can now incorporate the positives of blog advertising to change the way they do business with magazines (Hull, 2011) . Women across the globe recognise style icons such as Lucky Editor-in-Chief, Eva Chen. With more than 93 thousand Instagram followers, Chen reaches more worldwide readers daily than the magazine does in its monthly press - without its readership barriers (namely non-US readers). 


She tags labels she wears, providing free publicity with a reputable and iconic face for real-time advertising and as a way to stay engaged with their readers and advertisers.

EiC of Vogue and Fashion icon Anna Wintour recognizes that “fashion media has to reflect what’s happening in the world,” and as a multi-billion dollar industry, their embrace of interactive, multiplatform and globalised expression is a worthwhile move. The discursive break from the reign of “glossies” are a hard pill to swallow, but if creative media industries can embrace a globalised fashion world, there is a much greater chance that their survival can also be guaranteed.

Words: 785

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