Women's press is considered to be a full-fledged media genre that is, however, very difficult to identify, especially as a fashion worker. Where does the fashion press begin and where does the women's press end?
This question was in no way extravagant, which was too quickly resolved by an unconvincing, dishonest, and unrealistic incorporation technique.
In 1950, the magazine ELLE drew the commendable number of 500,000 copies per week in France. Containing 30 to 40% of advertising pages (against 70% for the others), the desire to move away from press offers that appealed to women in domestic vocations allowed the magazine to get closer to an intellectual elite, to write by women, about women. This strategy at the base of the craze was adopted by all the others, from the oldest (Marie Claire, 1937) to the very recent (Madame Figaro, 1980).
It is difficult today to obtain press figures concerning circulation, the most read magazines, the most purchased, as the health of the written press is as worrying as it is unmentionable for the first concerned.
In the 2000s, in the South of France, the purchase of a women's magazine was the inevitable weekly task, so much so that my experience as a teenager and that of my entourage was largely guided by papal directives gathered in a few pages. These pages contained nothing directly related to the life of "women", nothing that seemed "feminine": they were dedicated to fashion. The end pages, the editorials, decorated the rooms while the fashion and trend pages were meticulously read to answer a central question: "What to wear this summer?" This is an important question that has allowed the cagole style to persist and even to contribute to populating the almost desert space of fashion documentaries.
Of course, the quizzes of Jeune & Jolie accompanied the holidays, the sexuality pages of Cosmopolitan animated the evenings, and the investigations of GRAZIA exhilarated the debates. But nothing comparable to the attraction caused by the fashion pages, down to the advertisements which were the sesame of the collage workshops.
Later, my field experience with fashion workers would confirm the generalized appeal of these specific pages.
But then, what brings together these so-called women's press titles if not the clothing guidelines? What motivates the purchase of a women's magazine if not the immediate boarding of the style bandwagon?
We can certainly think that before this profusion of information allowed by the semi-material world of the web, the purchase of a magazine was the entry point to attractive information because it was well targeted and oriented. In this pre-webographic era, fashion would therefore be only one of the themes that interest women, incorporated into the women's press that brings them all together. It is in this sense that the magazine Marie Claire was named by its owner Jean Prouvost the "Vogue of the poor", in the desire to create a media market for all types of women.
However, bringing together such a large category of the population in a single genre, and then dividing it into a few magazines, is tantamount to denying the ability of women to document themselves elsewhere than in the women's press; to assign them to a supposedly complete and exhaustive media genre and, at the same time, to deny men's attractions for clothing (not to mention the commonly shared social need to dress) and other fetish subjects of women.
Strange as it may seem to the patriarchal world, women, as socially defined, have a capacity for diversification of reading which in no way authorizes attributing to them a single and unique special press.
The valve function of the women's press must be questioned, as it excludes women from the generalist press, from all the other press, and this from its very naming. In addition, while several women's magazines appeared in the hope of representing women of each social class, the distribution was made through the clothes, styles, and advertising pages therein disseminated.
In short, thanks to fashion and brand advertisers who distributed the women's press market according to their types of clients.
Before the global village of the web, we dreamed of targeting interests instead of and upstream of the readership; now it is up to the readership to define its own targets. Thus, in the age of the Internet, free articles, blogs, subjectivation, continuous news channels, freelancers on musical chairs, and the permanence of media funding by brands, is it not time to approach high-profile fashion as a safe bet?
Beyond a certain commonly adopted journalistic tone (which is also identified in scientific works thanks to subjects relating to fashion), the editorial lines of women's magazines in the French press stand out from one another.
Although they often share the same social issues and current topics, these titles have their own angles. Only fashion remains as a common point, however, let us remember, relegated to a sub-genre. And, when fashion is considered as a media genre in its own right, it is only to identify "niche" magazines, those that only talk about fashion. But is it really serious to say that fashion only talks about fashion?
This entirely rhetorical question nevertheless raises debates. In the attempt to take part in them and in the hope of drying them up, I think it is possible to evoke the daily life of fashion workers before proposing a frank and assumed abolition of the syntagm "women's press".
Social beings among many others, fashion press officers devour women's magazines every day with a very particular technique, hated by literary purists: starting at the end. Because, in the end, there is fashion.
For this type of individual, the women's press is above all a fashion media collection where it is good to observe the clothes of the brand for which one works. Note also that there is no such thing as a women's press officer. For the workers who contribute to the production of women's magazines, the greatest prestige is always allocated to the fashion editors, the latter benefiting from a comfortable notoriety once attached to a press title. In short, it is more prestigious to be a fashion editor than a society editor in the editorial staff of a women's magazine.
Finally, for stylists and other contributors to the creation of fashion images, a women's magazine that does not have a space dedicated to fashion is of no interest whatsoever.
This is explained by a sociological theory now socially shared: fashion is a social field, with structures, infrastructures and individual navigators. On the other hand, "the feminine" cannot and will never be able to claim such a status. Thus, being assimilated to fashion corresponds to a contribution-creation of a social role within an existing, material sector, while being assimilated to the feminine does not actually mean anything. Of course, many patriarchal axiologies have been trying to suggest the opposite for several centuries. But, whatever the case, and in the desire to contribute to the abolition of theories without a future, the "feminine" will never be able to constitute a social field, even within a sexist society. It is not to socially constructed genders that we must assign types of press: it is from social themes that we must build our media.
To speak of a "women's press" amounts to prolonging a binary vision of society while denying the power of one of its major cultural fields: fashion. In this special press, fashion plays a unifying role.
It is incorporated into the interview of the celebrity who is on the cover of the magazine, since a cover-star interview is never separated from its shoot. It is also at the heart of the theme of the issue, since the end series will correspond to it. It is the raison d'être of the shopping pages. It is the attractive feature of glossy paper, even when it is pixelated. And, a fact that is very important, it is what allows the magazine to live (on). Fashion funds the women's press. Specifically, fashion brands. This operation, which largely cancels the "safeguard of the people" and takes on an anti-democratic allure, nevertheless allows us to affirm that the field of fashion, at all levels of the press in question here, is the secret of longevity.
Therefore, privileging the women's press as a media hyper-genre that would incorporate the fashion sub-genre is to offer an unrealistic vision of a section of the press and, by extension, of a section of social reality. No other media genre has agreed to be built on a norm (or a standardized value) and not on a socio-material reality. Have we ever been able to read a media of wealth (opulence press)? A media of truth (truthful press)? A media of beauty (aesthetic press)? Why, then, was the women's press so easily created and maintained as it is? Why is its ideological function unequaled in the vast media field?
For historical reasons, dividing society in a binary and heterosexist way.
For capitalist reasons, relegating the woman to the home in order to provide unpaid reproductive work.
For ensuing economic reasons, attracting the housewife to a tactile pastime filled with advertisements and guides to good housekeeping.
For a psycho-social reason which, by introducing the great renunciation of adornment by men in the 19th century, then made the concepts of "fashion" and "woman" synonymous.
And, finally, for a reason of scale of values. Indeed, fashion, then considered an exclusively female frivolity, lost credibility while the women's press (which must treat all subjects in a linguistically strange tone, understand: different from the journalistic tone) retained at least the merit of being generalist-affordable, supposedly global. The women's press accepted its name because of the greater credit granted to the creation of the feminine condition than to that allocated to fashion. The latter having become a feminine pastime as extravagant as it is "light", but also excluding within the same social category, since there would be the aficionadas and the others.
However, it is to deny the reality of the sector and the composition of the field to make fashion an attribute of femininity, as the positions of high responsibility are occupied mainly by men (white and without a disability). A doubly polarized hypocrisy thus emerges between a press which attracts by its subjects on fashion, but which remains qualified as "feminine", reporting the events of a sector which is controlled by individuals qualified as masculine.
Of course, men's press exists. This means a certain sharing of stereotypy, but unequal between a conception of the feminine and a conception of the masculine, as the male press can afford to operate as a free electron, above the media fray in which the myriad of women's press titles battle daily. The men's press is a product of capitalism, created by its beneficiaries to maintain patronage and prolong the ideological function of the women's press. Men's press has a function of pretending to be equal. In addition, this special press maintains a heteronormative vision and promotes the myth of masculinity, for which we do not have to help reader-members to deconstruct the fantasy of permanence.
Ultimately, it is not a question of reversing the roles of hyper-genre and sub-genre between the women's press and the fashion press. My position, much more radical, is that the women's press must cease to exist as a term, as a media genre. Failing to be able to say that it does not exist (because, historically and discursively, this media genre has indeed been created), it is now necessary to review its priorities, to question its materiality.
Due to an appointment based on alienated values, and because of a maintenance of gender based on a validation of unacceptable norms that are inconsistent with the structural and economic reality of the sector, I propose that fashion becomes the only identifiable genre.
Inclusive by its function (to dress), inevitable by its materiality (clothing), unavoidable by its functioning (economic, production of desires, etc.), fashion has established itself as a media genre whose full validity deserves to be claimed. This genre, on the fringes of its fashionable social field, pushes back the discursive boundaries of its expansion, encouraging all individuals to take part in its construction, to develop its headings. Fashion as a media genre reinserts the function of mediator of public utility information within this category of press titles.
By accepting that the fashion press is the only effective genre of a certain press, and therefore of certain media, it becomes easier to appropriate it as an individual (and no longer only as a woman) to the point of reading this special press whose first civic act would be the subscription or the purchase of the title, ultimately freeing the editorial staff from a power exercised by the advertisers that no other media genre suffers so directly.
Defining the fashion press as a unifying genre makes it possible to strive for the freedom of journalistic speech and a collective redefinition of fashion, its discourse and its off-screen. Defining the fashion press as a media genre means abolishing the dichotomous conceptions of masculine/feminine within a special press that only holds together through its relationship to clothing.
With everything that is now accessible to us, with Judith Butler, with bell hooks, with Mona Chollet, with Silvia Federici, with Anne-Marie Lugan Dardigna, with Marianne Paveau, with Marina Yaguello, with all the theories that deconstruct norms on sexuality and gender through media discourse and beyond, let us not be situated.
It is up to us, readers, wearers of clothes, consumers of information, to use the knowledge produced around the notions of femininity and masculinity to claim a single reality of media reading: fashion, first and in common.
