Fashion magazines actively contribute to the construction of fashion as an exclusive field inhabited by stars and social elites and implicitly banishing everyone else. This is particularly notable in such periodicals as Vogue, whose own status with regard to other fashion press is expressly elitist. However, during the pandemic, Vogue started to publish material covering previously invisible social strata, such as the workers of the garments industry who had suffered from the lockdown. Of particular interest is an article on grocery workers, who are extolled as the frontline combatants of the current crisis without necessarily embodying the fashionable ideal. The proposed talk will examine such pieces of journalism, questioning whether these publications should be regarded as a concession to the zeitgeist or whether they foretell fashion’s more inclusive future.

Ksenia Gusarova>>