[ecrea] CFP ZoneModa Journal - Fashion and Celebrity Culture

*Call for papers*

cfp ZONE MODA JOURNAL 7

*Fashion and celebrity culture*

*Body spectacle and the enlarged sphere of show business*

**

For more than a century, the fashion industry and fashion marketing have 
actively participated in the enormous and progressive expansion of show 
business' sphere of action, expression, behavior, and texts (an 
expansion further stretched - in the new millennium - by you tube, 
social networks , video games, and the domestication of entertainment). 
The last two decades have been marked by the dissemination, 
availability, and spreading of information about fashion products, 
fashion sites and events, and, most of all, of fashion personalities 
(designers, models, art directors, publicists). This availability of 
fashion imagination and consumption has intermingled with other 
practices and pleasures of show business, from filmmaking to red 
carpets. Conflating with movie watching, awarding, publicity, and 
gossip, the viewers' expanded attention  to fashion items has had a 
great impact on the general notion of /what/ public personalities are 
and what they look like. It has contributed to inflate the interest in 
celebrities and to enlarge the number of celebrities. It has exploded 
the ambition and desire of the hitherto unknown  to increase their own 
public self-exposure, enlarging  spectators' experience of leisure and 
spectacle and the spaces of entertainment.

             At the same time, celebrities can be generated outside the 
world of the show business and instead turn a crime, a scientific 
discovery, a political statement into entertainment and spectacle. The 
artist-as-celebrity , going back to Oscar Wilde if not earlier , has 
been joined by the artist as /fashion /celebrity  , a phenomenon that 
arguably started with Andy Warhol , while  the past twenty years have 
seen the emergence of the /sporting /‘fashion celebrity ‘ ; musicians 
from every genre can be part of the new fashion spectacle, if they are 
suitably photogenic..  The general attractiveness of a myriad kind of 
celebrities, hybrid, hardly definable, open to dispute, has inflated and 
rendered more /visible/ the sphere of entertainment. Similarly, fashion 
was born when /couture/ inhabited restricted, private, and aristocratic 
conclaves: now expertise about clothing, style and  image creation has 
entered the sphere of spectacle and entertainment. Fashion creates 
images and codes through which celebrities are conceived and exposed, 
reproduced. Fashion forges the celebrity text. In the new millennium 
"Our lives, our intellect, our religion, our creativity, our sexuality 
are all the vocabulary of fashion and are open for renegotiation and 
representation. Yet we view fashion as suspect, insubstantial, the stuff 
of dreams not reality" (Changing Fashion: A Critical Introduction to 
Trend Analysis and Meaning’ Annette Lynch, Mitchell Strauss, p. 1 ). 
This could also be said of contemporary celebrity, which shares with 
fashion an ambivalent status, halfway between materiality and 
insubstantiality, where narration plays a pivotal role.

              The general public's enjoyment, contempt, and denigration 
of celebrities is based on personal narratives: stories about 
celebrities' private lives, about their bodies and apparatuses: 
aesthetic surgery, clothes, technologies... This journal issue devoted 
to celebrity and fashion investigates the modes of verbal and visual 
narrations revolving around attractive personalities. How does this 
narrative factor, which supports the celebrity system , operate within 
and  influence the world of fashion, and how have the stories about 
fashion (films, biographies, but also publicity, gossip, events, spaces, 
architecture) influenced the world of show business?

To tackle the intriguing relationship between fashion and celebrity 
culture, we suggest the following topics:

*Influence, masses, populism*: democratization of fashion, 
democratization of celebrity: conflicts and ambivalences between notions 
of ordinariness vs. exceptionality. Discourse about audiences as agents 
in the making of meanings concerning celebrities. Fashion seen as a 
vehicle of the mass appropriation of the means of construction of the 
celebrity's image.

*Success, achievement, publicity: *Fashion publicity, fashion 
branding**and the**culture of the branded self. Public versus private 
life, aristocratic exclusiveness versus egalitarism.

*Sponsorship and Internet celebrities*: Wide access to celebrity 
information through the social media: how does this generate new kinds 
of sponsorship on part of fashion brands? How do Internet personalities 
negotiate between their performance of authenticity and their fashion 
endorsement?

*Historical roots and new celebrities: *How is 20th century prototypes, 
i.e. the rock-star or the classical Hollywood star, influencing the 
culture of celebrity? Do new forms of celebrity (micro-celebrity, 
anti-celebrity, subcultural-celebrity...) correspond to new styles and 
new circulation of fashion trends? Old and new atypical star bodies: 
their impact on fashion bodily stylizations. Fashion professionals 
turning into celebrities.

*Character versus Film Persona*. Film and television characters' fashion 
styles interact with actors/actresses’ public personas. Are there 
celebrity icons who have become style icons due to their fictional 
characterizations more than their public appearance?

*Taste, disgust, anti-celebrity*. Celebrities as models of good or bad 
taste. Bad taste condemnation influencing the aesthetic canon. 
Anti-canon and celebrities' social connotation (celebrity chav, rich 
kids...). Anti-celebrity as a result of anti-fashion styles. How does a 
celebrity's repudiation of a luxury style affect critical consumption? 
Style icons turning into celebrities: how does taste capital" is 
transformed into "celebrity capital"?

*Cumbersome celebrities and fashion fails*: celebrities might become 
detrimental to fashion brands: scandals can induce both rejection and 
employment of a testimonial. How do fashion brands react to celebrities' 
lapses of style and fashion fails? Do these fall downs contribute to the 
construction of a celebrity?

Abstracts of no more than 1000 words + 5 bibliographical references 
(word-, doc format), written either in Italian or English, are be sent 
to: (zonemodajournal /at/ unibo.it) <mailto:(zonemodajournal /at/ unibo.it)>

Abstract acceptance does not guarantee publication of the article, which 
will be submitted to a double-blind peer-review process. The length of 
the article should be comprised between 6000 / 7000 words.

Important dates:

- abstract submission deadline: June 15, 2017

- notification of acceptance/rejection: June, 30 2017 (notice of 
acceptance might include comments and requests of explanations)

- full-lenght paper submission deadline: September 20,

- comments of the reviewers will be conveyed together with the 
reviewers’ decision (approval with no changes, approval with major/minor 
changes, rejection) by October 16, 2017

- authors shall send the improved article to the editorial staff by 
Novembre 6, 2017.

ZMJ7 is scheduled to be published at the end of 2017.




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