ABSTRACT
Fashion has historically relied on visual culture for representation and promotion. Since the early days of film, moving images mediated culture, functioning as entertainment and style guides for working-class women. The fashion and media industries have crossed paths ever since. Far from stopping this dynamic, the advent of the Internet garnered new opportunities to produce and disseminate fashion-related audio-visual content. In recent years, media companies targeting younger audiences began producing short Web series for free streaming on company websites and platforms such as YouTube. This chapter locates fashion newsfilms and Web series within journalistic discourse through their connection to broadcasting and the printed press. Departing from archival sources and resting on the notion of glocalisation, it argues for the historical role of fashion newsfilms as key to a geopolitical reconfiguration that demarcated the centre and periphery, positioning the West at the centre of an imagined global fashion and beauty culture. In so doing, this chapter situates fashion Web series as the materialisation of early aspirations to expand modern consumer culture within a complex matrix of emerging, dominant, and residual cultural flows, co-opting countercultural discourses of fashion, dress, and beauty and reducing them to branding tags for corporate media products.
