This dissertation concerns the changing role of fashion in the context of modern cities. In approaching this process, the research investigates the media discourse based on representations of fashion by cities and of cities by fashion. Moreover, this research focuses on fashion understood as a multidimensional phenomenon that aims to provide an explanation of urban spaces through fashion terms, actions, and garments. Additionally, cities are considered from the cultural geography approach that highlights the cultural component of urban spaces expressed in social and cultural practices in physical reality. Following this idea, it is suggested here that fashion today not only participates in the urban life as its significant component but also creates city images and representations of urban lifestyle through the fashion paradigm. In other words, fashion redefines urban spaces; at the same time, urban spaces are interpreted as a stage for fashion processes. By integrating in social research the fields of urban studies and fashion studies, this dissertation offers the discussion considering the fashion phenomenon not only as an urban phenomenon of modern reality. On the one hand, such discussion concerns the re-conceptualization of urban phenomena by the fashion influence; on the other hand, it relates the re-contextualization of fashion in a city. The empirical focus is based on the media context of fashion magazines in which variety of possibilities to represent fashion and cities lead to promising interpretations and analysis. The idea of representation specifies the ways of constructing the notion of urban space as fashionable space and the notion of fashion as placed in the urban context.
Fashion in the city and the city in fashion