Taste, Fashion and The French Fashion Magazine

For task 7/8 we had the choice of reading 2 different texts out 2 books, I chose to look at the first text from ‘Taste, Fashion and The French Fashion Magazine’ by Sander Miller it explains the rise and struggles of the first few fashion and lifestyle magazines published in and around Europe in the 16 and 17 hundred’s, during the enlightenment in late 17th centaury and the French revolution in 1789. The authors and publishers, such as Jean Donneau de Vise, Fredrish Melchior von Grimm, Henri Bidou and many more created and published many magazines around England and parts of europe, in which they wanted to explore or showcase the different trends and fashions but also the work of other designers like, interiors. By doing this they wanted to create a window for the fashion world to bring fashion designers to the forefront making their work to be appreciated in the way other artists such as painters and musicians do.

The magazines where used as a platform to make fashion more of a common interest, influencing women on the finest clothes and creating fashions and trends. In the book ‘Adorned In Dreams’ by Elizabeth Wilson, she states “The mass production of fashionable styles- itself highly contradictory, links the politics of fashion to fashion as art. It is connected both to the evolution of styles that circulate in ‘high’ and avant garde art; and to popular culture and taste”. From reading the first chapter, in ‘Taste, Fashion and The French Fashion Magazine’ by Sanda Miller. The text mainly discussed the ideas of taste and how this can alter or effect how we critique objects or work and how other people critique different things differently because they have a different taste, but it also making a valid critique. For example, Immanuel Kant states from the text ‘Taste, Fashion and The French Fashion Magazine’, “our subjective experience… ‘Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder’- affirms that there is no common denominator in our likes and dislikes”. This back’s up the idea of people having different concepts of ‘taste’, meaning no critique can be wrong. I found when reading this I thought It was a good concept as I may like a certain style of paintings and appreciate them where as others may have a different style to me therefore could disagree with my liking of certain works of art.

Bibliography
Barlett, Cole & Rocamora (e.d) 2013, Fashion Media: Past and Present, London: Bloomsbury

Wilson, E, (2003) Adorned In Dreams. United Kingdom: I.B Taurus & CO Ltd.
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Je49xdoIajwC&printsec=frontcover&dq=adorned+in+dreams&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiD7rCLhfbXAhUhJsAKHaDrCBQQ6wEIKjAA#v=onepage&q&f=false