After reading chapter 1 of ” Fashion Media: Past and Present”, I see Sanda Miller talks a  lot about fashion magazines. It seems that the emergence of the fashion magazines to have begun in eighteenth-century France and it really heavily depended on fashion. Like Miller says,”They have functioned not only as repositories of the progress of sartorial fashion and the most up-to-date social, cultural and artistic developments but also as self-styled barometers of taste.” As a very important carrier of fashion development, fashion magazines began to flourish in France as the leading fashion field.

But there was also a movement called ” The Enlightenment” during that generation, the movement has had a great impact on France’s economy, politics and art. So many people were shocked that the magazine was still being published through this barbaric time in history, when essentially it all happened because of view of opinion. This is why I think Miller questioned whether it was a fashion magazine or a journal of taste as it didn’t last long and caused a gap in fashion media.

One of the most incredible things that happened to me when I was reading this was that the magazine had changed its name three times. “The first proper women’s fashion magazine was Le Cabinet des Modes published by Jean Antoine Brun from 1785 until 1795, when it was renamed Le Magazine des Modes nouvelles francaises et anglaises; it was published under this title between 1796 and 1789, when it finally acquired the significant title Le journal de lamode et fu gout.” The  latter’s shrt existence coincided with the French Revolution, and Miller also wonder the fashion magazine in that generation is whether it was regarded not just as a record of style but also as a barometer of taste whose influence extended to a prescriptive function.

A lot of  people stand with Miller and agree that fashion began in Paris “everything began in Paris.” Paris still stood on ceremony as the fashion capital of the world. However, Paris was upstaged by other Italian and American fashion labels. Paris managed to maintain their position in high fashion however by the mid-1990s the fact was that French fashion wasn’t selling the way it used to and the French designers were by then in the history.

In conclusion,I really agree with Miller that although being separate identities, art and fashion do go in hand-in-hand but I don’t agree totally that France was the birth place of fashion media. The first fashion magazine may have been published in France however I do not share the same opinion that fashion media began in France because it is regarded as universal, fashion comes from everywhere. Fashion is Art and Art did not suddenly appear but grew and developed over time and travelled through different countries and cultures as did fashion. It cannot simply be pinned to one place as fashion is art and art is in everything. And of course, France is the most important part in the developing of fashion, no matter what.