As 2023 draws to a close, I have been thinking about some the smart and stylish communication projects helping to drive change in fashion this year; those that challenge existing practices and present positive and purposeful opportunities for creative fashion communicators!

Black Friday approaches and I’m filled with dread. I detest the urgency of Black Friday fashion marketing messages designed to make purchasing decisions seem like a now or never opportunity.

Much has been said in 2020 about the need to make the fashion industry more inclusive; one of the ways to assist fashion to become more inclusive and accessible is to make the language of fashion easier to use.

There is something compelling about the history of fashion for me. It’s a bit like the pleasure to be had from people watching – it allows you to assess the sartorial choices of others from a distance. However, any good study of the history of fashion needs to go beyond the scrutiny of silhouettes and design details, these simply signify how fashions can change over time.

When I began to investigate ugg boots and their ability to polarize taste, the multiple perspectives from which the humble sheepskin boot is viewed. Taste is complex, formed by numerous interacting entities, but I was unprepared for the hidden layers.

Much of what has concerned posts on this blog, has been about how we can understand fashionable taste and processes of taste transformation. This area is characterized by subjectivity and individuality – our taste is personal, created through a delicate mix of our internal dispositions and perspectives combined with various external provocations.

The taste-making assemblage can be thought of as a recipe – a group of components. The making of our own particular dispositions, tastes, likes/dislikes requires multiple ingredients.

Taste is not made sense of through one outfit, in the contents of one article or captured in one well-composed photograph. So, to elucidate on my view of the taste-making assemblage I have been playing with visual representations of the idea. These assemblages suggest a melting pot where tastes and their aesthetic expressions take shape – individually and collectively.

This light-hearted piece resonated with my thoughts on standing as a style statement. The article lists 15 “fool-proof poses” described variously as the knee-pop, the armpit air-out, the first day of school and of course the cross-legged stance (as seen here used by Paul Weller amongst others).

Posing for the camera as a way to express one’s fashionable taste is much more than getting on your feet in your Sunday best. Models and celebrities have long had to master the practice of standing stylishly for the camera; however, this activity has more recently become a mainstay of fashion communication in the digital environment.

I wanted to write more about Peter Leonard’s digital humanities research in the Vogue archive. His visual representations of continuity and change in Vogue during the 20th century are not only visually stunning, but also thought provoking.

Vogue is a long-standing taste-making institution, with a reputation for drawing together a selection of the most fashionable people, places, brands and products between the covers of its monthly magazine.

As an avid observer of influence in fashion, I have spotted a notable shift in discussions of fashion tastemakers; they now prefer to focus on social influencers. This is in part, an up-dating of terminology acknowledging the importance of social media to fashion; however, on closer inspection the changing terms suggest there is more going on than just a semantic shift.

The fashion designers, fashion editors and journalists, stylists, photographers, models, celebrities and bloggers that form this particular group of taste shapers all come with a job title – as listed here! The job titles allow us to have a general idea of the type of work these people do; however, specific taste-making activities are not so neatly defined.

The notion of a fashion tastemaker brings to mind important individuals in the industry who are often known simply by first names, such as Karl, Carine or Muccia. The ‘circles of influence’ mapped in this article have high-profile taste-making designers at their centre with other people noted for their influence on fashion (models, fashion editors, journalists, DJs, etc) circling in their orbit.

A series of decade by decade fashion panels (1850 - 2010) selected from fashionlexicon.net (archived material). These screenshots draw together both creative illustrations of period dress, and information on fashion and social influences for of each era.

Change in fashion comes about through an incremental series of related connections and interactions and its movements will create ripple effects through other areas of our lives. With this notion of change in mind, I would like to talk briefly about the fashion timeline.