Style over Substance?: Fashion, Spectacle and Narrative in Contemporary US Television

Previous scholarship on fashion and film has debated the aesthetic role played by onscreen costume. Yet there has been little exploration of fashion and its use in television. Existing work on fashion in onscreen media has approached the debate from a textual perspective, and such work has been informed by the longstanding assumption that fashion acts primarily as ‘spectacle’, disrupting the economy of narrative flow. This article seeks to challenge this assumption by arguing that previous work is limited by the wider conceptual and methodological problems of purely textual approaches. Using CW’s Gossip Girl as a case study, the author suggests that a mixed method approach to the study of costume (using both textual analysis and reception studies) provides a more productive foundation upon which to begin to examine the function of onscreen fashion in contemporary US television. Such an approach may have particular importance in understanding how costume in ‘fashion-forward’ television can be best understood if one steps beyond the text to explore the sense-making of viewers, the intentions of costume designers and the relationship between viewers, the shows and the wider fashion market

Creativity, craft and Christmas: Textual negotiations and the politics of Kirstie’s Crafty Christmas

In April 2013 the United Kingdom’s Department of Culture, Media and Sport announced plans to remove ‘craft’ from the list of recognized creative industries, initially claiming that craft occupations have more to do with technical skill than creativity. Concerns were immediately raised within the craft sector that such changes would cause a shift in the symbolic meaning of craft that would in turn devalue the industry and render its workers invisible. Yet precisely at the moment in which visibility was thought to be at risk, the craft sector was experiencing global hypervisibility within mainstream and online media spaces. This article examines the precise nature of this media visibility at a time of political uncertainty and contends that an investigation into the symbolic meaning of craft cannot overlook the importance of representational culture. Consequently, media studies offers a unique lens through which to examine the politics of craft and contribute meaningful responses to the following questions: how is the meaning of craft articulated in the symbolic environment at a time of political contestation? What is the role of gender in the mediated representation of craftwork? These questions inform the analysis of a specific example of representational culture: Kirstie’s Crafty Christmas (2013). This one-off episode documents Allsopp’s attempts to source handmade gifts and decorations from UK craft workers and enables the concerns above to be raised within a very specific context: the Christmas festival. Both craft and festive rituals blur boundaries between work/leisure and public/private in similar ways, which in the case of craft becomes problematic for policy-makers. In the case of Kirstie’s Crafty Christmas, this blurring of boundaries promotes problematic (gendered) hierarchies that position the work of micro-entrepreneurs as necessary, domestic unpaid labour and in so doing, privatize and deskill women’s home-based creative work

Below-the-(Hem)line:Storytelling as Collective Resistance in Costume Design

This article examines the storytelling practices of a particular community of “below-the-line” practitioners: costume designers. Their stories are often written out of media histories that privilege the testimonies of above-the-line (typically male) professionals. This article provides a corrective to these androcentric accounts of media production. Using material gathered from the Costume Designers Guild’s official publication, the Costume Designer (launched in 2005), I apply a gendered lens to the examination of trade stories and argue that the stories costume designers tell can be understood as radical acts of “speaking out” against a neoliberal production culture that attempts to silence them

Warner Correspondence, March 11, 1886

As a newly-wed transplant to Florida, Helen Warner regularly wrote home to her mother Mrs. Haig, who lived in Buckinghamshire, England. The letters describe both personal matters, and those of larger interest, including the establishment of an orange grove and the development of Narcoossee

Warner Correspondence, October 2, 1885

As a newly-wed transplant to Florida, Helen Warner regularly wrote home to her mother Mrs. Haig, who lived in Buckinghamshire, England. The letters describe both personal matters, and those of larger interest, including the establishment of an orange grove and the development of Narcoossee

Warner Correspondence, September 2, 1886

As a newly-wed transplant to Florida, Helen Warner regularly wrote home to her mother Mrs. Haig, who lived in Buckinghamshire, England. The letters describe both personal matters, and those of larger interest, including the establishment of an orange grove and the development of Narcoossee

Warner Correspondence, May 15, 1887

As a newly-wed transplant to Florida, Helen Warner regularly wrote home to her mother Mrs. Haig, who lived in Buckinghamshire, England. The letters describe both personal matters, and those of larger interest, including the establishment of an orange grove and the development of Narcoossee

Warner Correspondence, September 14, 1886

As a newly-wed transplant to Florida, Helen Warner regularly wrote home to her mother Mrs. Haig, who lived in Buckinghamshire, England. The letters describe both personal matters, and those of larger interest, including the establishment of an orange grove and the development of Narcoossee

Warner Correspondence, June 18, 1886

As a newly-wed transplant to Florida, Helen Warner regularly wrote home to her mother Mrs. Haig, who lived in Buckinghamshire, England. The letters describe both personal matters, and those of larger interest, including the establishment of an orange grove and the development of Narcoossee