10:30-11:45 a.m.
Contextualizing Fashion, Beauty and Ageism in Palmers Underwear Advertising in Glamour Hungary
Petra Egri, University of Pécs
“BREAKING! A woman in her fifties posing in a pair of panties and a bra”- writes a fashion journalist from Glamour Hungary about the Palmers ‘End of Sorry’ advertising campaign.
The giant underwear advertisement was displayed on a tall building in Vienna, a total of 5 floors high. Despite the sensationalist title, the fashion journalist wanted to draw people’s attention to the fact that we need to do away with stereotypes associated with ageing and that today the fashion industry is opening up to older generations.
Julia Twigg has researched the media representation of fashion and ageing in Vogue UK and argues that fashion inhabits a world of youthful beauty. Its discourses are glamorous and youthful. Age by contrast is perceived as a time of grayness. It is associated with a toned-down, self-effacing presentation. Many people today still assume that fashion is a phenomenon linked solely to the concepts of youth and beauty. However, the fact that the baby boomer generation (who rebelled by wearing miniskirts) has now reached retirement age also suggests that the fashion industry needs to increasingly target older consumers, who have a strong demand for fashionable clothing.
The fashion industry has for a long time contributed to the myth of eternal youth and the fashion media has helped to create negative ageist prejudices by presenting largely young and thin female bodies. In my paper, I will give examples of when fashion media today can work in a different way that Twigg envisioned. In my case study, I will present an Eastern European example, analyzing Glamour Hungary’s articles about the ‘End of Sorry’ advertising campaign by Palmers. I will also examine how comments on social media responded to this very positive advertising campaign.
From Haute Couture to Cargo Pants: The Career of Carrie Donovan
Lesley Heller, Fashion Institute of Technology
This study examines the career of Carrie Donovan (1928-2001), a prominent fashion journalist whose professional journey reflects the evolution of the fashion industry from the mid-20th century’s emphasis on haute couture to the late 20th century’s shift toward casual and mass-market fashion. Donovan began her career writing for The New York Times and later held editorial roles at Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and The New York Times Magazine where her breadth of reporting covered major industry milestones, including Mark Bohan’s debut at Christian Dior and introducing the world to Donna Karan. In the late 1990s, Donovan transitioned to become the spokesperson for Old Navy, a mass-market retailer, showcasing her ability to adapt to and shape the changing fashion landscape.
Donovan’s career paralleled the broader industry shifts, such as the rise of casualization and the decline of strict fashion dictates. In this era, casual, affordable clothing gained popularity, driven by changing consumer behavior and the growing influence of marketing. Old Navy, with its unique mix of affordability and style, emerged as a leader in this movement. Donovan’s collaboration with the brand—marked by her witty advertisements and campy television commercials—brought credibility to the retailer and demonstrated how her fashion expertise resonated with a mass audience. Long before social media, Donovan found a way to make herself and the brand “go viral.”
By analyzing Donovan’s writings and campaigns, this study highlights her role in bridging the gap between high fashion and everyday wear. The paper also contextualizes her work within larger cultural and economic trends, such as conspicuous consumption, the democratization of fashion, and the commercialization of personal style. Ultimately, Donovan’s career serves as a case study of the profound transformation in fashion during the second half of the 20th century, showcasing how industry leaders adapted to a more accessible and consumer-driven fashion landscape.
Contextualizing and Understanding The Relationship Between Fashion Magazines and GenAI
Doris Domoszlai-Lantner, FIT and MassArt
In 2012, when Vicki Karaminas proclaimed that “the accelerated delivery of fashion images to a mass audience has resulted in the hypertrophy of the image,” fashion blogs were outperforming traditional print magazines because of their willingness to break ground on emerging social media technologies. Just two short years later, Robin Givhan declared that “the golden age of ‘fashion blogging’ [was] over” because magazines had embraced the social trend, bridging the gap between themselves and bloggers such as Leandra “Manrepeller” Medine. The digital landscape, especially that of the digital fashionscape, has changed dramatically since the early 2010s, most notably in the last five years with the increased use of generative artificial intelligence, or GenAI. Much like their hesitancy towards using social media, many major magazines have been—for better or worse—slow to integrate GenAI into their output. The May 2023 issue of Vogue Italia featured an AI-designed editorial, as did the June 2023 digital cover of Harper’s Bazaar Serbia, yet, aside from coverage of the latest advancements, mass media has not used AI generated content regularly. It is once again smaller, independent entities that are experimenting: namely, the creative agency The Copy Lab’s COPY Magazine, which was created using Midjourney and ChatGPT; Fogue AI Magazine, a data-based project by a UAL student. This presentation will discuss the use cases of GenAI in fashion magazines, highlighting major developments in this burgeoning field, and provide two case studies that touch on issues such as discussing prompt engineering, racial homogenization, and beauty standards by analyzing the visual and textual content of the aforementioned projects, while contextualizing them within the greater fashionscape and its history, and moreover, within three “hypers:” Karaminas’s hypertrophy, and the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s hyperreality and hyperconsumerism.