Can We Trust the Words That Fashion Media Uses to Talk About Fashion Objects?: A Review of ‘Words on Fashion Websites’ with a Dubious Title
Courtesy of Maria Spadoni, 2022.
As I write this, journalists, reviewers, and columnists of the most influential fashion websites in the West are saturating their articles and commentaries with the word “new”.
In just the last month, the term has been used a striking amount of times, precisely 461 million[1], on ten of the most influential lifestyle and fashion websites. [2] Let’s, for a moment, accept that each time the term “new” has been used it was indeed referring to items or events that really were a novelty, never-before-seen bursts of originality. Let’s try to believe that the fashion media industry has actually witnessed the birth of 461 million “new” somethings only in the last month… doesn’t it seem ridiculous already? This computation might be compromised, some might argue, since the term “new” is also part of “New York”. I checked, for good measure, and yesterday alone the term “new” was used 19 million times compared to 4 million times [3] for “New York”. The use frequency of “new” is still scarily over the top.
Screenshots from WoFW, 03/07/2022.
Screenshot of WoFW 03/07/2022
“Is it really plausible that every single thing the word “new” has been used to refer to really lives up to such assigned “newness?””
Mainstream fashion media writes about objects, events, garments, people, and initiatives, assigning them a “newness” over 19 million times every day. I simply wonder: is it really plausible that every single thing the word “new” has been used to refer to really lives up to such assigned “newness”? Or is it that the word “new” has lost its meaning, and the value it refers to, along the way? What does this say about the way that text and words are used in fashion media?
The data aforementioned is accessible on Words on Fashion Websites, a project initiated by writer and fashion researcher Femke de Vries. The site houses a search engine that can be used to critically explore how text is utilized in the realm of online fashion media, collecting data from ten high-profile fashion and lifestyle websites like vogue.com, elle.com, highsnobiety.com, hypebeast.com, and harpersbazaar.com[4], some of which count more than 90 million unique monthly visitors. Words on Fashion Websites is an essential tool for gathering insight on how text is used and distributed through online fashion media and which type of words are the most used. Like many fields of specialization and interest, fashion has its own set of specified words and terminology that differ from one segment of the industry to another. In particular, there is a certain set of words associated with ideas of newness, originality, and authenticity that tend to be overused in fashion media writing. When attributed to fashion objects, these concepts transform into neoliberal values; they become interest-generators for the consumer masses at the service of capital. I accept the critical perspective that fashion is built on a paradox: “the pressure for art status, on one hand, and industrial production on the other”. [5] Fashion aspires to the unique and unrepeatable, presenting itself as the democratic instrument that allows for the development of individuality, while sneakily contributing to the inevitable flattening of personalities and lifestyles that derives from mass production and consumption. This is the persistent conceptual berserk that fashion feeds into, the selling of products that have been mass-produced, and are flattened out of every possible flaw or variant that create uniqueness, with the simultaneous description of them with words such as “new”, “authentic”, “original”, as means for developing original identity. From this critical perspective I researched how these three words-values-concepts are used in online fashion media, specifically in the 10 source websites targeted by Words on Fashion Websites.
Words on Fashion Websites has different pages with various functions: some of them work according to user input, like the Search page that shows how a word of your choice is used in relation to image and text on the 10 targeted source websites. The pages Compare and Explore focus more on frequency in use of specific words. Both the Search and Compare pages have a feature that collects and shows, before you’ve entered your word of choice, what terms other people have been recently searching. This function facilitates correlation and makes you inexplicably want to click on the previously searched “Kim vs Kanye” on Compare, just to discover that the word “Kim” is used way more often.
Now, back to the Search page. I entered the term “authentic”, and got 238,000 text results as well as 50,300 images related to it. I scrolled dully through the first text results, in which the word was used as part of “Authentic Brands Group”, the New York City brand management company that owns more than 50 consumer brands, as well as the likeness rights of celebrities like Muhammad Ali, Marylin Monroe, and Elvis Presley. Indeed, I say to myself, very authentic. After that I had to scroll through the various articles about “Vans Authentic”, the world-famous heritage Vans shoe with shoelaces and waffle sole. The name of this shoe left me wondering about the means of using the word “authentic” to define a shoe type. While it would be reasonable to label a certain material—authentic leather, for example—as such, I wonder if the word “authentic” here is perhaps used as a reassuring green light for customers, almost an encouraging label suggesting that what you’re buying here is the real deal. No cap.
After these wanderings, my eye was caught by an image result: it was the picture of a light-colored bottle with a label saying “Authentic Beauty Concept”. Wow. Authentic Beauty Concept in a bottle. I fantasized about magic drinkable Alice-in-Wonderland potions that would turn you into who-knows-who’s realized beauty concept.
When I clicked on the picture it brought me to the elle.com website: it was linked to an article called “A Very Detailed Guide to Cutting Your Own Bangs at Home”, published in May 2020. [6] The promising little bottle, with a name so alluring, turned out to belong to a line of hair products that was sponsored in the article. Shampoo, hair mask, hair conditioner, styling mousse. Not exactly aspirational. I laughed, disenchanted, at the ridiculousness of it all.
This made me eager to try and search for a set of words derived from previous research of mine on the Search tool and note down the number of results generated. [7] All the words I entered on the Search page are in different ways connected to the three main concepts mentioned above: newness, originality, authenticity. Unsurprisingly, the word that has the biggest amount of results is “new”—of course, the idolized new—topped only by the word “fashion” itself, with two million more results, which I find indeed laughable. It is like these two words, and the worlds of meaning they carry with them, are impossible to separate. [8]
Another curious piece of information gathered from entering the fixed set of words on the Search and the Compare page (on which you can observe how often two words of your choice are used to date), is that the term “authorship” has only 190 text and 236 images as results. This surprises me, as the fashion industry holds so dearly to the value of authorship and is so eager on every level to have it respected. And it amazes even more to make the comparison with the term “ownership”, which instead counts 56,800 text and 7,060 images. This raises some questions, I believe, about which values are prioritized by fashion media. If we’re thinking from the perspective of the fashion makers, [9] it would be challenging to believe that owning something is more relevant than being the author of such thing: often, for makers, the two values have the same importance, since being the author of something means having rights—or better, owning the copyrights—to that thing. These two concepts together, for original fashion makers, are intertwined as the two stakeholders of the value of “originality”. But the case was totally different, if we were to think from the perspective of fashion consumers for whom owning is not even comparable to authoring. For consumers, the two word-actions become alien to each other, and owning becomes the one desire that the economy wants to feed, with fashion media feeding this loopy mechanism. Still, I can’t help but wonder if the consumer’s ownership might be related, somehow, with the phantom of originality… Owning certain objects might make you feel original, reassured by the “authentic” labels, emotionally serene to finally have conquered uniqueness and identity. This suggests more of an emotional experience of consuming fashion, which makes me think of the description of Words on Fashion Websites: the words “turning fashion into feelings and garment into dreams”. [10]
Listed here are the tracking results generated by entering “A Lexicon for Uncreative Strategies” ’s terms into the search tool of Words on Fashion Websites. [2]
The only page of Words on Fashion Websites that does work without user input is the Explore page, which tracks and charts how frequently a fixed set of “typical” and “non-typical” fashion words are used based on preliminary research into text in online and printed fashion media. These typical and non-typical fashion words are grouped into categories, like for example Time, Feeling, Value; subsequently the words with similar meaning and usage are grouped into sub-groups. In the Time category, for example, there is a sub group of words that refer to Time as in “Today”, some of which are: contemporary, everyday, modern, moment, now, today, daily, present. I didn’t expect the words in this specific set to have results so different from one another, as they all refer to the present time that fashion is seemingly so obsessed with. But instead, the term “now” alone is used more than the rest of the words put together. [11] The results that I expected from the “Today” category were actually the ones I got from the “Instant” category, where “Latest” has 44% frequency of use, compared to the also very high “First” with 28% and “Update” with 16%.
Screenshots of WoFW, 04/07/2022.
The multitude of charts and diagrams on the Explore page reveal which words are preferred over others and this, from my perspective, can highlight a certain sameness and monotony in the language choices of fashion media. The 10 websites selected for Words on Fashion Websites are explicitly mainstream distribution channels with huge amounts of daily traffic, read by millions of people that become accustomed to the language choice and can relate to the terms “vibe”, “love”, “shine”, “smile”, but also “fun”, “normal”, “ordinary”. [12] All these words, and the most-used words in general, [13] seem to be quite generic and imply an emotional response from the public. They echo the values of abundance, exclusivity, desirability, and velocity that are core to a consumer-oriented type of fashion media discourse.
“What really strikes me is the seeming disconnection between the meaning of text and the objects it is referring to. It seems like text is a fundamental tool to imbue objects with value, necessary to create the emotional response in reader-consumers.”
Words on Fashion Websites is a precious tool that helps question how text is used in the context of mainstream fashion media, highlighting the ridiculous and funny contradictions typical of the industry, like the term “original” being used 2835 million times in just a couple of years, a result that conceptually crashes with the encyclopedic meaning of the word. [14] The platform shows that the most frequently used words are often generic and broad, the kind of words whose meaning is hard to narrow down. It is like these kinds of words serve as emotional triggers to the reader-consumers, provoking a reaction of familiarity in them, which facilitates the producer-consumer mechanism and feeds the neoliberal engine of fashion.
But apart from this evidence, what really strikes me is the seeming disconnection between the meaning of text and the objects it is referring to. It seems like text is a fundamental tool to imbue objects with value, necessary to create the emotional response in reader-consumers.
Words used in fashion seem to have a split personality, they seem to represent something different than what they actually mean. Calling an object “new”, “authentic”, “original” in the fashion realm just seems out of context from this perspective, as these words—along with many others—have lost their primal meaning and have been imbued with neoliberal value instead. It is like we cannot trust these words, as they’re there to serve capital. As they’re there to turn “fashion into dreams and garments into feelings”. [15]
Notes
[1] Words on Fashion Websites, last accessed 03/07/2022, 19.45. https://wordsonfashionwebsites.com/explore
This data was obtained by entering the individual word “New” in the Explore tool, and by selecting the date range 15/05/2022 to 15/06/2022, on Words on Fashion Websites. Screenshots from WoFW, 03/07/2022.
Screenshots from WoFW, 03/07/2022.
[2] Words on Fashion Websites tracks data from the following ten websites:
businessoffashion.com with 1.03 million unique monthly visitors
net-a-porter.com with 5.06 million unique monthly visitors
thecut.com with 8.69 million unique monthly visitors
hypebeast.com with 9.4 million unique monthly visitors
highsnobiety.com with 11.2 million unique monthly visitors
harpersbazaar.com with 16.38 million unique monthly visitors
refinery29.com with 19.64 million unique monthly visitors
elle.com with 35.24 million unique monthly visitors
vogue.com with 94.1 million unique monthly visitors
asos.com with 59.72 million unique monthly visitors
[3] This data was obtained by entering the words “New” and “New York” on the Compare tool of Words on Fashion Websites. Last accessed 03/07/2022, 20.12. https://wordsonfashionwebsites.com/compare Screenshot of WoFW 03/07/2022
[4] The website (Words on Fashion Websites) uses the Google Search API as a tracking system, since the 10 source websites don’t have individual API’s. The Search and the Compare pages work according to input of users: the Google Search API targets the 10 source websites and allows the user to see text and images connected to the searched word, as well as the frequency of use. Whereas the Explore page runs constantly and tracks the frequency of use of a fixed set of 100 words every day: the Google Search API is called once a day at 23.55 and saves the total number of results of that specific word along with the entry date. Read more at: https://wordsonfashionwebsites.com/about . Last accessed 01/07/2022
[5] Nancy Troy, Couture Culture (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003), 194.
[6] “A Very Detailed Guide to Cutting your own Bangs at Home”, Nerisha Penrose, 19 May 2020. Last Accessed 15/05/2022 https://www.elle.com/beauty/hair/a29605764/how-to-cut-bangs-at-home/
[7] In recent times in fact I’ve been researching recurring terminologies in my research framework, focusing on mapping out a lexicon, called “A Lexicon for Uncreative Strategies” (Spadoni, Forthcoming, 2023). It is a 25 entries collection of words and concepts that are crucial to approach the creative processes uncreatively, specifically in relation to fashion. For each entry, there is a short, unfixed definition, a quote, a bibliographical source, and sometimes a critical question regarding the controversies that the term might raise in relation to the zeitgeist. This collection of terms would want to inspire the reader-maker to overcome the aspiration to fashion neo-liberal values like newness, authenticity, and originality and instead embrace the promiscuous nature of creation and inspiration, and the inevitable hyper-relations between reference and copies.
[8] For more on this, see Lars Fr. H. Svendsen, Fashion: A philosophy (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 2004).
[9] I intend fashion “makers” referring to both material and immaterial workers, specifically those who originate both kinds of work within the realm of fashion.
[10] Words on Fashion Websites, last accessed 04/07/2022, 17.20. https://wordsonfashionwebsites.com/about
[11] This data was obtained by selecting the “Time” fixed category on the Explore tool of Words on Fashion Websites. Last accessed 04/07/2022, 9.34. https://wordsonfashionwebsites.com/explore Screenshots of WoFW, 04/07/2022.
[12] All the words mentioned have high rankings trackable in the Explore section of https://wordsonfashionwebsites.com/explore.
[13] Ibid.
[14] From the 27 August 2020 to Today the word “Original” has been used 2835 million times.
This data was obtained by selecting the “Value” fixed category on the Explore tool of Words on Fashion Websites. Last accessed 08/07/2022, 10.23. https://wordsonfashionwebsites.com/explore Screenshots of WoFW, 08/07/2022.
Screenshots of WoFW, 08/07/2022.
[15] Words on Fashion Websites, last accessed 06/07/2022, 12.40. https://wordsonfashionwebsites.com/about
