On the paratextual thresholds of fashion: The creation and early analysis of a dataset of fashion magazine captions

Abstract

This article focuses on fashion ‘paratexts’ – text snippets such as titles, introductions and captions – as connotative and denotative forces within the ecosystem of the fashion magazine. Building on current research on fashion text and writing, we introduce the ‘Fashion Paratext Dataset’: a research project that explores the technical and aesthetic dimensions of fashion captions and their strategic role in the reading of fashion images. The project employs a methodology from data science to produce a substantial dataset of modern fashion captions that can be analysed and interpreted by the researchers. This article outlines the context, methodology and reports on initial findings of this research project which aims to further understand the way language, via paratexts, functions in the cyclical production of fashion and throughout its history as a modern industry. Further to this, we show how these liminal texts actively mediate editorial content within contemporary fashion media (a hybrid of digital and analogue platforms) and thus define how we relate to garments, and fashion.