Thursday, September 11, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
This is the blog for CTCS 677, a course at USC that will situate debates in cultural studies about the formation of identity and the relationship of production to consumption within an analysis of the fashion and beauty industries, especially as these industries have been represented within popular media culture.
6 comments:
Chuck Bass. Both my style icon and a testament to an aggressive push to cajole and groom male consumers. Tie-ins, indeed.
See link to Details's sort of silly take on this 'recent' shift. I'm not exactly sure if this is actually a new trend. But, the article certainly does do a good job of both pathologizing and making their ideal male reader feel better about their consumption habits:
http://men.style.com/details/features/landing?id=content_7368
Well, since you mentioned Gossip Girl....
As I mentioned in class last week, I spent a fair amount of time searching for Serena's white dress (and I always thought that I was more of a Blair).
http://teamsugar.com/group/1816741/blog/1898027
Upon re-searching today I found a lot more websites that identify this particular dress. Several weeks ago I was stuck in a web of endless links back to the CW website. What I did find somewhat interesting during this process is the way that all of the official CW information, the "SeenON!" information focused primarily on the outfits that you can buy (as opposed to featuring the super expensive fantasy outfits). This seems to relate to my forthcoming post, but it seems to me that media sites have become especially adept displacing fantasy items with mass produced/cheaper (although still expensive) items. If Young talks about the importance of fantasy in the process of reclaiming our clothes, I think it is often difficult to distinguish where this line of fantasy or pleasure might be.
I have to say that I have just recently become obsessed with Gossip Girl (literally, today) and I already want to go out and purchase extremely expensive clothing that I can only wear on certain occasions. I don't know exactly what that says in relation to this week's readings, but I do know that each episode I watch makes me want to get off the couch, put on some bad pop music, and play dress-up with confidence. True confession of the day.
I have typically been a woman who errs on the side of 'jeans and a t-shirt.' However, lately, there is definitely something to the combination of pop music and trendy fashion that seems to increase my desire to wear outrageous clothing without feeling any need to explain myself. I suppose I am a sucker for advertisements, especially when in the form of television narratives.
Totally great and really important connection to make between music and fashion. I'm sure there are tons of ways that we can talk about this just in Clueless (urban feminine fashions = Luscious Jackson and Jill Sobule / emo college boy fashion, i.e. "chin pubes" = Radiohead / skaterboy fashions = Beastie Boys). With Gossip Girl, Josh Schwartz works with music coordinator, Alexandra Patsavas, who also chose the music for The O.C.. And they both have prided themselves on having their finger on the pulse of music style cultures. One need only think of Seth Cohen's Death Cab For Cutie obsession and penchant for Penguin sweaters. Maybe we'll get more into this during subcultures week.
Post a Comment