Gendering of success: fashion designers in designer stories in the Finnish lifestyle magazine Gloria

Abstract

Fashion journalism is part of the fashion system that legitimizes and reproduces the creativity, celebrity status, and symbolic power of fashion designers. This article examines the gendering of the success of fashion designers in designer stories in the Finnish lifestyle magazine Gloria. The material consists of 21 stories about designers published in 2013–2014. They are analyzed by applying a multimodal close reading that takes into account the dialogic relationship between written text and images. The analysis highlights the gendered representation of success: male designers emerge differently from women designers as glamorous personas and successful professionals. First, male designers are related to a grand tradition and presented as designers in the own right, whereas women designers are mostly depicted as continuers of a man’s work or a family business; second, many women designers are presented as designers of one particular hit item; third, women’s designership is presented as work and business instead of genuine creative art; and fourth, women designers are presented as more approachable and communicative human beings than men both in verbal and in visual expression. Hence, success is produced in a way that emphasizes the male designers’ visionary characteristics and decreases the grandeur of the women’s designership.