The politics of fashion criticism : how newspaper journalists’ evaluative criteria for fashion changed between 1949 and 2010

Sociological research of diverse cultural outlets demonstrates that the legitimisation of a cultural form as a valid outlet strongly relies on discourse of critics. Yet, little is known of the evaluative practices of fashion journalists, especially the criteria they rely on to evaluate fashion collections. Through a grounded theory analysis of 1301 collection reviews from The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune issued between 1949 and 2010, this chapter discusses the shift in the themes that newspaper fashion journalists employ to make sense of the latest collections. Special attention is given to the shift from a materially oriented to an intellectually oriented discourse and the intense repudiation of the use of fashion history in contemporary fashion in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The chapter conceptualises this dynamic as “a culturally modernist discourse” by which journalists seek to frame fashion as a serious business. They engage in a conservative politics by which they aim to establish the cultural worth of both their object of criticism, i.e. high-end designer fashion, and themselves through performing a process of distantiation from the commercial roots of fashion