Digital Technologies and Change in the Field of Fashion Journalism

In this chapter, I draw on Bourdieu’s field theory to argue for its relevance for interrogating the contemporary space of fashion journalism, and, particularly, recent changes related to digital media. Although many scholars have drawn on Bourdieu’s work to conceptualise journalism as a field (see e.g. Chalaby 1998; Benson and Neveu 2005; Eldridge 2018; Wu et al. 2019; Perreault and Stanfield 2018; Vos 2016), they have tended to focus on news journalism at the expense of other forms of journalism, such as fashion journalism. This reflects the lack of attention that has been given to soft news in journalism studies more generally. In the first section, I introduce Bourdieu’s field theory. I apply it to the case of contemporary fashion journalism to begin mapping some its key dimensions and drawing attention to the value of field theory to discuss dynamics at play in this space of cultural production. The section also provides a conceptual and contextual ground for the focus of subsequent sections on the topics of field change and digital technologies. I concentrate on the UK although, as in the rest of the chapter, I will often engage with a wider geographical space, since, as I will argue, the field of fashion journalism and the fashion media is transnational. In the second section, I look at the way Bourdieu theorises field change through the notions of morphological, technological, social and economic factors of change. His framework offers useful analytical tools for making sense of the emergence of a new range of players that have entered the field of the fashion media in recent years - namely, bloggers, TikTokers, fashion brands and tech companies. I draw on this theoretical discussion in the third section to continue mapping the contemporary field of fashion journalism and to explore recent changes in this field. In this chapter I approach fashion journalism as lifestyle journalism, that is, a type of journalism that covers topics related to consumer goods and provides news, information, and advice in a factual and/or entertaining way (From & Kristensen 2020; Hanusch 2013, see also Findlay and Reponen 2023). I also include fashion industry-related commentary and information and, as with journalism more generally, ‘reporting, criticism, editorializing and the conferral of judgment on the shape of things’ (Adam, cited in Zelizer 2017: 230). This is a working definition only and a purposely broad and ‘soft’ (Deuze and Witschge 2017) one since what constitutes fashion journalism - and journalism more generally - is itself an object of struggle in both the field of fashion and that of academia, an idea I return to in the chapter. As many journalism scholars have argued, ‘journalism’ is a moving target, an ever-shifting set of practices, definitions, and boundaries. It is ‘in a permanent process of becoming’ and ‘a dynamic object of study’ (Deuze & Witschge, 2017, p. 13). Bourdieu’s field theory gives us conceptual tools for mapping and interrogating this process of becoming