Inside the Wardrobe: Fashioning a Fashionable Life

Abstract

This article looks to the manifestation of the personal wardrobe in digital fashion media. It focuses upon the example of British Vogue’s YouTube series ‘Inside the Wardrobe’ and episodes that feature, firstly Vogue Fashion Editor Sarah Harris and Vogue Contributing Editor and Freelance Stylist Bay Garnett, and, secondly, acclaimed fashion blogger Susie Lau aka Susie Bubble of StyleBubble.com. In doing so it addresses ways in which fashion is an ‘autobiographical act’ and explores how such acts participate in the production and consumption of life narratives, and in particular the narrative of a ‘fashionable life’. The article argues that fashion, in this sense, is a narrative tool employed in the fashioning of oneself and that this is strategically utilised, both consciously and subconsciously, in the field of fashion. Thus, when employed as strategic narrative tools the autobiographical acts that can fashion a self constitute the particular autobiographical form, or autobiography, that is the ‘fashionable life’. In doing so this article demonstrates the contribution that the study of fashion makes to a wider understanding and knowledge of self­identity, life narrative, autobiographical acts and autobiography in digital mediums and media.