Fashion Torn Up: Exploring the Potential of Zines and Alternative Fashion Press Publications in Academic Library Collections

Abstract

As interest in traditional publications, such as Vogue, Elle, and Marie Claire, wanes and other mainstream titles fold or move to online-only platforms, selecting the most representative or influential publications for academic library collections from this vast array of new titles is particularly challenging. That some of these publications have limited print runs or irregular publication schedules or are generally scarce or hard to source has added another layer of difficulty to the production process. Nevertheless, the importance of these smaller fashion publications to the field of fashion studies is becoming increasingly apparent, as their bold design, inflammatory articles, and irreverent, tongue-in-cheek editorial concepts have clearly influenced the mainstream fashion press.Access to visual media is essential in an academic library supporting fashion students. Fashion, as a business and industry, produces large volumes of visual media, from magazines to street-style blogs, which can be as important to students as scholarly literature. Students also have a diverse range of perceptions and responses to fashion that are not necessarily well represented in the conventional fashion press. Zines and the alternative fashion press have therefore become increasingly important to fashion students, as both researchers and as creators, as they offer a counterdiscourse to popular representations of what fashion is or is supposed to be. Access to zines can therefore provide students with new pathways to interrogate fashion literature and explore dress history at a more nuanced and personal level than traditional fashion discourse might allow. Further to this, the fashion industry has also begun to embrace the zine as a format. A growing number of zines take the fashion system as their inspiration, and in turn, a number of fashion magazines can be seen to be embracing the archetypal zines aesthetic. It is clear that zines of all kinds are important to art library collections, and growing numbers of art libraries are including zines as a part of their artist book collections or as a separate collection in their own right (Freedman 2009;Wee 2017). This is a reflection of their increasing importance to art students and in arts education, as both a research tool and pedagogical aid, and has naturally led librarians and academics to explore how zines could be used in the classroom and as a part of the library research process within arts disciplines. The link between zines and creative disciplines such as graphic design and illustration seems straightforward, but zines have become increasingly important as fashion publications and thus to the study of fashion as an academic subject. In addition to providing fashion students with visual inspiration, zines are also valuable tools for teaching fashion studies from alternative viewpoints and encouraging the diversification of fashion media.Although zine collections are becoming well established in academic libraries, particularly those that have specialist collections with an ar...

Machine Learning in the Construction of Library's Special Collection Document Information Resources

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