Fashion as ‘Force for Change’? How Ideologization Reshapes the Work of Intermediaries in the Legitimation of Culture

Abstract

What happens when politics enters strongly aesthetic cultural fields? This article proposes a novel conceptual framework, which we propose to call ideologization, to understand how political-ideological considerations influence cultural legitimation. We build on theories of legitimation and cultural intermediaries to examine the strategic case of fashion as a cultural production field at the intersection of aesthetics and economics. Combining an analysis of frames in fashion magazines since the 1980s with critical discourse analysis of British Vogue in turning-point year 2020, we theorize ideologization as consisting of three elements: aesthetic agenda-setting; the reimagination of relations between producers, consumers and intermediaries; and the generation of discursive contradictions. This process of ideologization, which we see across cultural fields since the late 2010s, has strong implications for intermediaries who act as framers and brokers of legitimate culture. We conclude by proposing future research to further develop the ideologization framework and detail the long-term impact of political-ideological logics on cultural fields.