Fashion Criticism: An Anthology, edited by Francesca Granata
A review of Fashion Criticism: An Anthology, which was edited by Francesca Granata.
“Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.”
Fashion Criticism, edited by Francesca Granata (2021). Published by Bloomsbury Visual Arts.
Once upon a time, I was a failure of a fashion student. I went to the best fashion school in the world at the time, and I didn’t take any courses in fashion history or art history. It was one of my biggest regrets, despite me somehow finishing four minors in three years along with two degrees. Because I was in the business school, I was banished to a life of math and legalities, finding comfort in artistic classes such as film. We watched movies and then talked about them. That was beautiful, I will admit.
My very last semester at FIT, I managed to get myself together and registered for the Costume and Fashion in Film class with the fashion historian Raissa Bretaña. My friend and I texted the entire semester about how cool she was; we literally wanted to be our professor, who had such a deep knowledge about fashion history and how it intertwined with the world of cinema. '
And, despite me doing tragically bad in that course (I wept over my B+) because I literally knew nothing about fashion history, I got my feet wet in that world. And then I bought this book!
I honestly can’t tell the difference between this and fashion journalism at times; some of these pieces are more in-the-moment, recounting times at working in a Parisian copy shop where they made fakes/copies of all the designer products being pumped out into the world. And there’s some real gold nuggets, where we get into the sociopolitical essays about fashion, race, and politics. I particularly enjoyed the afro essay, that was very much up my alley.
Let’s dive into this, shall we?
Book Blurb
This is the first anthology of fashion criticism, a growing field that has been too long overlooked. Fashion Criticism aims to redress the balance, claiming a place for writing on fashion alongside other more well-established areas of criticism.
Exploring the history of fashion criticism in the English language, this essential work takes readers from the writing published in avant-garde modernist magazines at the beginning of the twentieth century to the fashion criticism of Robin Givhan-the first fashion critic to win a Pulitzer Prize-and of Judith Thurman, a National Book Award winner. It covers the shift in newspapers from the so-called “women's pages” to the contemporary style sections, while unearthing the work of cultural critics and writers on fashion including Susan Sontag and Eve Babitz (Vogue), Bebe Moore Campbell (Ebony), Angela Carter (New Statesman) and Hilton Als (New Yorker).
Examining the gender dynamics of the field and its historical association with the feminine, Fashion Criticism demonstrates how fashion has gained ground as a subject of critical analysis, capitalizing on the centrality of dress and clothing in an increasingly visual and digital world. The book argues that fashion criticism occupied a central role in negotiating shifting gender roles as well as shifting understandings of race.
Bringing together two centuries of previously uncollected articles and writings, from Oscar Wilde's editorials in The Woman's World to the ground-breaking fashion journalism of the 1980s and today's proliferation of fashion bloggers, it will be an essential resource for students of fashion studies, media and journalism.
Content / Overall Thoughts
I think this is a very good book if you’re just starting to get your toes wet in this type of content, like I am. There’s some really big gold nuggets in here that are lost to canon literary and intellectual history—like we are not often taught that both Oscar Wilde and Susan Sontag both wrote fashion journalism and criticism pieces.
Sontag, in fact, was commissioned by Vogue Magazine in the 1990s to write about fashion and its spectacle. As it’s stated in the preamble to the section her piece is contained within, the vast majority of the pieces she ended up writing were lost in history, never republished until now, when this essay was published in the anthology. As a Sontag fan myself, I didn’t know this at all.
We go from the early 1900s, starting with Oscar Wilde, up until more contemporary writing. I liked how she made this less Eurocentric in the way that we acknowledge the politics of fashion, something that many in mainstream media don’t notice with the fashion industry. We mention Pat Cleveland many times in this book, and she is even featured on the cover. That’s a revolutionary woman right there, who was one of the first Black models in the industry.
There’s also a lot of sass from the writers in this book, and humor, which comes across very well in their writing. I absolutely loved that, because it made the act of reading this book so much more enjoyable. It didn’t feel academic.
It didn’t feel tough to read. It was harder content at times, especially if you’re not used to reading through essay collections from cover-to-cover, but this was something I didn’t skip around from essay to essay.
I seriously don’t have much to say about this book outside of if you’re a fashion and journalism fan, this is the book for you. I hope to break into the field of criticism, and this was a good book for me to examine and pick apart for the craft.
These are edited by Granata, but these are also indeeed some of the best essays of fashion journalism put together in one spot. It’s a must-have for your collection because it’s something you can return to again and again, learning from the craft, and also finding historical and contemporary writers for you to look deeper into their work after you’re done with this book.
All in all, highly recommend this beauty! She’s also aesthetically pleasing on the bookshelf, if I may say so myself. A bit pricy, but definitely worth a read.
