Between Edge and Elite: Niche Fashion Magazines, Producers and Readers

This thesis examines contemporary niche fashion magazines and uses as a case study an ethnographic investigation of a niche fashion magazine and its producers and readers. Fashion magazines are instrumental not only in helping readers make sense of, understand and consume fashion; they are themselves fashionable media that set trends in how fashion is mediated. Niche fashion magazines are a sub genre of fashion magazines that is produced and consumed by cultural intermediaries. They are part of a complex cultural circuit which involves their marketing, production, circulation, textual representations and readers' consumption. Within this circuit values, meanings, codes, notions and practices of fashion are exchanged, and these are the focus of this thesis.

This thesis examines the niche fashion magazine genre, addressing its hybridised quality of art, popular culture, high fashion, elite and edge. Through active participant observation, the case study explores the production practices and the different economies and values that inform the encoding of fashion into the magazine. Drawing on in-depth interviews with niche fashion magazine readers, the thesis also explores how readers make sense of niche fashion magazines by engaging with their symbolic value.

Within the fashion press niche fashion magazines are the focal media for the tastemakers of fashion. Yet niche fashion magazines as an object of inquiry has been neglected by academia, which has paid more attention to women's and men's magazines and their textual representations. A central aim of this thesis is to contribute to an understanding of the meanings of fashion mediation with a specific focus on the methodological integration of textual, consumption and production analysis. By generating new insight as to how fashion is exchanged and mediated between producers and readers of niche fashion magazines it contributes to the study of fashion within sociology and media research.