Photographed at...Locating Fashion Imagery in the Cultural Landscape of Post-War Britain 1945-1962

This thesis explores a history of fashion and art in post-war Britain. The historical analysis of this study focuses on how institutions and spaces of public culture – such as museums, galleries, exhibitions and art schools – were used as locations for editorial photo-spreads published in the British editions of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar between 1945 and 1962. Fashion magazines participate in the cultural production of art by depicting its institutions, its products and producers as fashionable. This thesis interrogates the ways in which the field of fashion, and fashion media in particular, thereby gives symbolic value to the field of art through its mediation. In its examination of the ways in which representations of art and fashion have been meaningfully constructed for a high fashion magazine readership, the thesis contributes to a further understanding of the relationship between fashion and art, and affords new insights into the cultural history of post-war Britain.

The theoretical framework of this study engages with Agnès Rocamora’s model of ‘fashion media discourse’, which brings together the work of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. This thesis draws upon Foucault’s work on ‘discourse’ and Bourdieu’s concept of ‘cultural production’ in order to conduct an ‘archaeology’ of post-war British fashion media and its participation in the cultural production of art. This thesis has developed Rocamora’s concept in its application to a specific historical study of fashion media. In doing so, this thesis contributes to a wider understanding of how the theoretical work of Foucault and Bourdieu can be applied in the scholarly research of fashion media and histories of fashion. This thesis contributes to the further knowledge of practices in history concerning methodologies of archival research and textual analysis.

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