Niche Fashion Magazine as Artwork. The postmodern origins of an 'indefinite field of many explorations' in photography

Abstract

At the dawn of the new millennium, the scene of the independent periodical press has seen the affirmation of a hybrid genre of magazine in which fashion and art coexist, mainly through photographic content. These are the so-called niche fashion magazines, the direct filiation of editorial policies aimed at generating interface mechanisms, cross-fertilisation and metamorphosis between the two fields, capable of blurring the demarcation lines between the cultural industry and artistic research. In this vein, publications such as Visionaire or Purple attracted the migratory flow of contemporary photographers and artists who, in the spirit of a postmodern cultural nomadism, readily put their operational practices at the service of fashion journalism, favouring the transfer of poetics and linguistic codes from one field to another. By going back to the roots of this tension in the cultural climate of the 1980s, the article aims to highlight the auroral phases of the dynamics of the “merchandising of culture” and the “culturalising of merchandise” that favoured the flowering of this editorial niche, anticipated by seminal and decidedly unconventional realities such as View/Vue, a supplement to the New York weekly The Village Voice, or Six, the flagship magazine of Comme des Garçons.