Question
Access a copy of Vogue and two or three other current editions of fashion magazines.
Analyze the visual content from the point of view of fashion iconography. What recurrent objects, people, and places are depicted? Are there direct or indirect references to religion, mythology, or folklore?
Write a summary of your findings. Identify media usage of objects, themes, persons, and spaces that are considered iconic in fashion.
Answer
Fashion iconography
Vogue Magazine uses fashion iconography in most of its news features and articles. The images and symbolic representations feature objects, people, bands and places. The magazine describes how Metal Iconography emerged in the 1980s and how it went mainstream. The magazine review the 80’s style metal logos that have in a way found themselves back to the mainstream fashion industry. The magazine depicts a number of popular music stars as having embraced metal symbols and not just on fashion runaways, but also in their daily life. The magazine depicts Justin Bieber, Kanye West, Rihanna and Lady Gaga as some of the celebrities adorning themselves with fashion pieces bearing metal symbols. Popular designers such as Cali Thornhill DeWitt are also depicted in the article. DeWitt is famed for designing gothic script which has been adopted by Kanye West. In this year, a fusion between Metal Iconography and Black Sabbath, a popular music band, reinvigorated the metal fashion – the band’s album is at the back while the brand’s logo cover fills the front of a denim jacket (Yotka, 2016).
The magazine considers Irving Penn as a fashion and arts icon. Irving Penn is a legendary fashion and portrait photography icon who features in a number of articles. A number of his photographs and other works are exhibited in the Smithsonian American Art Museum. This art museum is no ordinary one; it contains exhibitions of arts, photographs, designs, and other works dating back as far as 1930s, all collected from popular designers and artists of the time. Irvin Penn was heavily influenced by Surrealism, which can be regarded as some type of mythology (Kelham, 2015).
References
Kelham, J. (2015, Nov. 13). Penn’s fashion and art photography. Vogue
Yotka, S. (2016, March 31). How Metallica went mainstream: The rise of Metal Iconography in Fashion. Vogue.
