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Since the 1980s, the figure of the ‘girl’ has become one of the most prominent subject positions offered up in British fashion magazines (Jobling 1999). This way of constructing femininity harks back to the observation made by Roland Barthes, in 1967, that the rhetoric of fashion ‘reproduces, on the level of clothing, the mythic situation of Women in Western civilization, at once sublime and childlike’ (1990: 242). This article argues that both facets – the sublime and the childlike – continue to inform constructions of femininity in contemporary fashion magazines, with the niche publication, Lula, girl of my dreams, being a particularly marked example. Methods of textual and discourse analysis are employed to make sense of written and visual excerpts, drawing from issues of Lula spanning 2006 to 2012. Discourses on Romantic childhood and discourses on ‘high’ fashion – both of which construct their objects as ‘pure’ – are shown to intersect on the pages of Lula thus producing the Lula girl as otherworldly creature, while disavowing the less palatable aspects of the fashion industry that bring her into being. Inviting nostalgic recollection of childhood, the Lula girl is shown not to recall childhood in any objective sense but rather to reconstruct childhood through the mythic tropes of Romantic innocence. The possible appeal of this vision of womanhood for both magazine producers and consumers is theorized through the concept of ‘investment’ as well as recent debates on pleasure and politics in feminist media studies. Ultimately, the Lula girl is shown to facilitate imaginary solutions for real-life frustrations by dissolving the contradictions of normative femininity as well as encompassing elements excluded from contemporary definitions of adulthood

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Since the release of Kubrick's film in 1962 visual representations of Lolita have proliferated. Yet, such visualisations tend to re-signify ‘Lolita’, departing significantly from the way she is constructed in Nabokov's novel. This article considers why the figure of ‘Lolita’ fits so seamlessly into the logic of the fashion media in the West. It points to the fashion industry's fixation with the ‘woman-child’ and infantilisation, as well as the centrality of clothing and consumption in Nabokov's novel. Particular attention is paid to Marc Jacobs’ advertisement for Oh, Lola!, banned in the UK by the Advertising Standards Agency in 2011. Methodologically, the article presents visual analysis alongside findings from audience studies conducted with female participants.

This article makes the case for reception studies as a useful tool in the visual analysis of fashion photography. While there has been increased attention paid to methodology in the field of Fashion Studies of late, the study of audience reception—that is, the way viewers make sense of images—remains underdeveloped. This article lays down an experimental methodology for reception studies of fashion media, using the focus group format as sociological method and “discursive performativity” as theoretical framework. It presents a critical appraisal of this method, drawing upon the findings of research on the “woman-child” in European fashion magazines, from 1990 to 2015. In so doing, the study engages with debates on the “female gaze,” the active audience, polysemy and the “effects” of fashion magazines