Keeping it (Hyper)Real: Virtual Fashion and The Face Community

Abstract

This article investigates the (history) lessons revealed by THE FACE about the present. As such it concentrates on one area of deviation that exists within THE FACE – the yearly fashion issue. The seductive, and highly hegemonic, nature of fashion is no more obvious than in the pages of monthly style and genre journals. Within these pages, fashion literacy is assumed and naturalised as commonsensical. The visual communities that revolve around magazines like THE FACE further enhance this legitimising process. This framing requires a literacy of THE FACE discourse, one that melds the knowledge of fashion with the familiarity of lifestyle, consumption and pleasure. Fashion, then, is a language embedded with the signs and syntax of the everyday. Fashion is not a free-standing construct: it is socially defined within the sphere of a community ideology. The illustration of THE FACE community could concentrate on many facets of the magazine, but in this investigation it is these vogue registers that demand a specialised understanding of THE FACE and its mobilisation of a verbal and visual fashion language, or indeed a fashionable FACE language.