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Abstract

Fashion journalism is often viewed as unsuited to the role of legitimate cultural criticism. The present article sees two recurring motivations for this observation: the fashion press' strong dependence on fashion advertising income and a long-standing tradition that rejects the transient temporality of fashion in which journalistic accounts of fashion often take part. These observations are probed for the genre of high-quality daily newspapers, drawing on a case-study of fashion reviews published in The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune between 1949 and 2010. First, the article examines important structural developments in the fashion writing of these newspapers. Next, it briefly discusses the interpretative tools on which contemporary fashion journalists rely in their reviews. The article finds that since the late 20th century the fashion journalists of the NYT and IHT have established a fashion criticism that, much like film criticism in the 1970s, may contribute to the cultural valorization of designer fashion. Yet, the article also wonders whether the way in which current fashion criticism supports the growing cultural worth of high-fashion is straightforwardly positive for the valence of the ephemeral temporal nature of fashion. 

Keywords: Fashion criticism,  high-quality newspapers,  cultural valorization,  temporality