The Politics of Fashion Media: Traditional Print vs Social Media
Cultured Magazine hosted a high-profile event in New York City just last week to celebrate its latest print issue—this, at a time when conversations surrounding the death of print continue to intensify. The event was not just about the magazine itself; it was about signaling relevance, taste, and cultural capital in an industry that, despite popular belief, still looks to print publications for cues on what and who matters—in their case, what or who shapes culture today. The launch of the CULT 100 list– a list of influential culture-nurturing people– illustrated how print media, when executed with intention, creativity, and purpose, continues to thrive and play a significant role in the fashion and cultural landscape.
Magazines like Vogue and Cultured maintain a great deal of influence within fashion, even if their pages are not being read or their sales on the newsstand are not drawing in big numbers. Their impact stems from editorial curation and strategic relationships with designers, celebrities, cultural institutions, and, of course, the ways they leverage social media. At the CULT 100 event, held at the Guggenheim Museum, A-list celebrities were in attendance—Sarah Jessica Parker, Walton Goggins, and Julia Fox were some of the bigger names, who were all featured in the magazine. The event’s location and guest list underscore what some of us already know: while platforms like Instagram and TikTok are often praised for democratizing fashion and culture, providing more accessible, immediate, and authentic alternatives to the gatekeeping tendencies of traditional print media—true authority still lies elsewhere.
This essay argues that while fashion magazines have significantly shifted from print to digital, print is still relevant and arguably coming back. These magazines have successfully adapted to a social media–first, digital world, and their role as arbiters of taste remains intact. Meanwhile, social media’s promise of accessibility and openness often masks a different kind of hierarchy, one built and reinforced by ambiguous algorithmis– “I am persuaded by arguments that the blogosphere is structurally antidemocratic, especially as it is increasingly integrated into and pervaded by capitalist logics that are imbricated with colonial and imperialist histories” (Pham, 2). Wide democratization due to social media can be further away from truth and inclusivity than the hierarchies existing within traditional print by offering the illusion of authenticity while replicating and amplifying wide exclusion without accountability.
Despite the dominance of digital platforms like Instagram and TikTok—and the rise of the influencer economy—print magazines like Vogue and Cultured have not only survived but have also innovated, using their institutional credibility and elite networks to reaffirm their status as legitimate taste-makers. Vogue, in particular, offers a clear example of legacy media’s cultural entrenchment. Its history reflects major shifts in consumer demand and publishing models: “At the time that Vogue was founded, a profound shift was taking place in the publishing world. In the 1890s, magazines began to rely on advertising as their primary source of income. While earlier periodicals generated revenue from subscription and newsstand sales, the new breed of mass publications actively solicited advertising dollars” (David, 2025).
Vogue’s Eurocentrism and nationalist tone are particularly interesting to consider, as its influence grew by sustaining both identities in one publication–something that contributed to their survival. As David writes, “While it maintained privileged ties to Europe, it also began to embrace more populist understandings of ‘authentic’ American taste and style in dress,” eventually entering a culturally imperialist era and exporting “American fashion writing through British (1916), French (1920), and even Argentinean (1924) editions” (David, 14). Vogue has historically functioned as a tool of soft power, shaping perceptions of American femininity (its first issue famously portrayed a young debutante), wealth, and aspiration through highly curated editorial choices. While its glossy pages may no longer serve as the primary source of fashion news—and are often viewed more as collectible objects than informative texts—its brand, anchored by annual events like the Met Gala and Vogue World fashion shows, continues to dictate aesthetic trends and social hierarchies in the fashion world.
As one of the most influential fashion publications in the world, Vogue has long functioned as a gatekeeper of style and cultural capital. Central to this role is Anna Wintour, who, since becoming editor-in-chief in 1988, has wielded immense influence over fashion’s visual language, seasonal trends, and even the careers of designers. Wintour’s stewardship of the magazine has aligned it with a polished, aspirational aesthetic that often reflects and reinforces dominant power structures within the industry, favoring certain bodies, brands, and narratives. Yet her influence extends far beyond the page. Through institutional partnerships like those with the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) and her curation of American designers for New York Fashion Week, Wintour helps shape not just what is fashionable, but who is considered fashion.
Perhaps most emblematic of Vogue’s cultural centrality is the Met Gala, which has evolved under Wintour’s leadership into a globally watched spectacle that merges celebrity, haute couture, and museum curation. The Gala, technically a fundraiser for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, functions more as a stage for elite branding, both for designers and celebrity attendees. Each year’s theme becomes a visual prompt for the fashion industry to perform its aesthetic and cultural values, with Vogue at the helm documenting, critiquing, and canonizing those performances. In doing so, Vogue illustrates how tightly fashion media can entwine with spectacle and power, setting the tone for how fashion is consumed, interpreted, and remembered on a mass scale.
Mediatization, as a theoretical framework, refers to “how the media [has] become increasingly central to the shaping and doing of institutions and agents, to their practices and experiences” (Rocamora, 507). Rather than consumers viewing media simply as a tool for communication and marketing, mediatization emphasizes how things such as immediacy, visibility, and constant content production have reshaped how institutions operate and how people engage with the world. This has proven to be of great impact to the fashion industry, not only on the consumer side but also very significant in its production processes, e.g., fast fashion. The fashion show is perhaps the first fashion medium that significantly changed and has evolved through media, shifting from a buyer-first to influencer-first priority, these shows being staged and curated for social media relevance, filled with celebrity–focused on traction– mediatization helps explain why fashion magazines still matter and the ways in which even in this shift they hold relevance–they have become hybrid platforms that both reflect and help define the digital dynamics of taste and status.
Even with popular critique around social media’s role and impact in rampant consumerism, algorithmic bias, and the need for authenticity, enabling performance, social media has undeniably furthered fashion by democratizing access and amplifying visibility for new voices. What in the fashion industry was years of working to the top, nepotism, and influence, platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube have allowed independent designers, stylists, and fashion enthusiasts to bypass traditional gatekeepers like magazines and luxury houses, building audiences through direct engagement, emotional connection, and aesthetic innovation. What once required a Vogue feature can now be achieved through a viral post. This shift has enabled more diverse narratives in fashion, making room for creators of different races, body types, genders, and cultural backgrounds to shape trends and challenge industry norms. But, just like Vogue and its contradicting history, social media too has negatively impacted the industry, and people believe it has even “flattened fashion” (Rocamora, 1).
This extension of the brand reveals how the magazine operates as more than a publication; it is an ecosystem of cultural significance and influence. Its ability to convene celebrities, designers, and public figures under one fashion theme, then mediate that experience through online coverage, social media posts, and editorials, creates a feedback loop in which print and digital mutually reinforce each other. The red carpet is covered by Vogue’s digital team and reposted across TikTok and Instagram, but the magazine’s editorial authority continues to shape how those images are consumed and interpreted.
In the context of fashion and fashion magazines, this shift is evident in how designers and even consumers adapt their practices to align with the rhythms and aesthetics of digital platforms, attempting to stay in the loop in a world in which the attention economy is crucial to brand success. As Agnes Rocamora argues, the mediatization of fashion means that the media do not simply report on fashion but participate in constructing its very meaning, value, and desirability.
The fashion show is perhaps the first fashion medium that significantly changed and has evolved through media, shifting from a buyer-first to influencer-first priority, these shows being staged and curated for social media relevance, filled with celebrity–focused on traction– mediatization helps explain why fashion magazines still matter and the ways in which even in this shift they hold relevance–they have become hybrid platforms that both reflect and help define the digital dynamics of taste and status.
Even with its many critiques—rampant consumerism, algorithmic bias, the pressure to perform authenticity—social media has undeniably furthered fashion by democratizing access and amplifying visibility for new voices. Platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube have allowed independent designers, stylists, and fashion enthusiasts to bypass traditional gatekeepers like magazines and luxury houses, building audiences through direct engagement and aesthetic innovation. What once required a Vogue feature or Fashion Week slot can now be achieved through a viral post or a carefully curated feed. This shift has enabled more diverse narratives in fashion, making room for creators of different races, body types, genders, and cultural backgrounds to shape trends and challenge industry norms. But, just like Vogue and its contradicting history, social media too, harbors contradictions of its own. While it offers unprecedented exposure, it often rewards content that aligns with dominant beauty standards and fleeting trends, reinforcing many of the exclusions it claims to disrupt. The very platforms that uplift marginalized voices and advertise inclusivity is simultaneously commodifying identities, reducing complex cultures to clickable aesthetics. In this way, social media replicates the same cycles of appropriation and erasure long critiqued in traditional fashion media—only now, they happen faster and with a global reach.
This has created a new market for the return and resurgence of the fashion magazine, though now, its evolving forms promote a more intersectional approach to understanding fashion. The term intersectionality, coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, was originally used “to denote the various ways in which race and gender interact to shape the multiple dimensions of Black women's employment experiences” (Crenshaw, 1244). Since then, awareness of intersections between fashion, race, gender, and culture, and in the creative end too, finds intersections for fashion, food, art, and more, has become increasingly prominent, propelling the rise of a new genre of fashion magazine. Just recently, The New York Times published an article saying that “Independently produced print magazines with an emphasis on fashion are experiencing a boomlet of sorts, making waves for their striking design and high-quality production” (Meltzer, 2025).
These new magazines have created something that many thought was long gone. They are no longer something disposable, cheap, and oversaturated; they are a luxury, a keepsake, a fragment of time and history. They have created a space that, unlike Vogue and more like Cultured, is freed from a long history of contradiction and invites questioning. They showcase diverse art and lead voices that are both silenced and skewed by mainstream media and social media altogether. The return of the fashion magazine has become a vehicle for creativity, like we had seen flattened by the Instagram grid regime of it all. Something that sets them apart is their backing—these magazines are freed of the corporate constraints set on magazines like Vogue by Condé Nast, a lot of them independently funded, self-financed: “Magazines like Cultured generally rely on ways to stay afloat that are quite similar to those of mainstream print publications. They have advertisers who are happy to pay a cheaper rate for a smaller magazine with a younger audience.”
Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory, and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989(1), 139–167. https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8
David, A. M. (2006). Vogue's new world: American fashionability and the politics of style. Fashion Theory, 10(1-2), 13-38.
Marisa Meltzer: The Revenge Of The Niche Fashion Magazine. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/style/fashion-magazines.html
Pham, M. H. T. (2011). Blog ambition: Fashion, feelings, and the political economy of the digital raced body. Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, 26(1), 1-37.
Rocamora, A. (2016). Mediatization and Digital Media in the Field of Fashion. Fashion Theory, 21(5), 505–522. https://doi.org/10.1080/1362704X.2016.1173349
