Le Monde's discours de mode: creating the créateurs

This paper is the second in a series of articles I have written on the, as yet, largely unexplored field of fashion journalism. It is also part of my long-running critical engagement with the French fashion media and the discursive construction of the French field of fashion.

Discourses on fashion are sites where different versions of fashion are constructed, diverse meanings and values attributed to it, and ultimately where different notions of culture are conveyed through the conceptual distinctions made between high and low cultural forms. The paper is concerned with such discourses as they take place in the French newspaper Le Monde, in its reports on high fashion shows in 1996. Through the textual analysis of 35 articles, selected at random from the newspaper and drawing on Bourdieu's notion of symbolic production, the paper interrogates the symbolic value Le Monde attributes to fashion and comments on the construction of fashion as high culture. It sheds lights on the role of fashion writing in the definition of fashion and culture in the specific national context of production.