Fashion in city magazines: the global and the local in Time Out (pp.375-390)

The increasing globalization of the fashion industry has forced garments to lose part of their original social meaning and to be inflected by local circumstances while adjusting to the world cityscapes. This process is reflected by fashion media and journals where the need to gain a wider audience has forced the language of fashion into a set of unified visual and textual models and registers shared and understood by an overgrowing global audience. This is true of both specialised and non-specialised fashion magazines, of highly sophisticated journals and of popular fashion magazines as well as of city magazines that constantly mirror the image of the ever-changing cityscapes. City magazines such as TIME OUT are in many ways representative of local and global fashion. This contribution addresses the following research question: Is the language used in the specific sections devoted to fashion representative of: a. fashion jargon (technical and trendy) ? b. global and local fashion trends? c. the city/ies the magazine is published in? The research design included the development of a corpus of the 2005 issues of TIME OUT published in different cities in the world.