Brian Moeran

A Japanese Discourse of Fashion and Taste

Brian Moeran is Professor of Culture and Communication at the Copenhagen Business School and was previously Professor of Japanese Studies at the universities of both London and Hong Kong. He is a social anthropologist by training and has written and published widely on advertising, media, art and aesthetics in Japan and Asia. His current research is a comparative study of international fashion magazines in five countries. A Japanese Discourse of Fashion and Taste

Elegance and Substance Travel East: Vogue Nippon

Brian Moeran is Professor of Culture and Communication at the Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. A social anthropologist by training, he has conducted extensive fieldwork in the advertising and publishing industries, particularly in Japan where he is currently doing fieldwork on “fragrance cultures.” Among his publications are The Business of Ethnography: Strategic Exchanges, People and Organizations (Berg, 2005). bdm.ikl@cbs.dk Brian Moeran Elegance and Substance Travel East: Vogue Nippon

The Portrayal of Beauty in Women's Fashion Magazines

Abstract This article explores the ways in which international fashion magazines such as Elle, Vogue, and Marie Claire portray feminine beauty in textual and advertising matter and how their readers react to such portrayals. It is based on content analysis of more than 700 issues of these titles published in France, Hong Kong, Japan, the UK, and USA, and collected over a fifteen-year period, as well as on extensive ethnographic research among fashion magazine editorial staff and women readers of the magazines in question. The analysis focuses on the different kinds of “face” that magazines invite their women readers to put on. While magazine contents confirm the validity of previous feminist critiques, the article argues that magazine editors—and their advertisers—adopt a “technology of enchantment” as a means of exercising control over their readers. Magazine and advertising language is imbued with “magical” power, and the structure of beauty advertisements closely parallels that of magical spells used in healing rituals. The efficacy of such spells is borne out by reader interviews.

Fields, networks and frames: advertising social organization in Japan

In this article I focus on three kinds of overlapping social coordinates — fields, networks and frames — as they are worked out in the day-to-day activities of a large Tokyo advertising agency. My aims are threefold. First, to show how the three social forms of fields, networks and frames interlock in a dialectical manner that permits both macro- and micro-levels of sociological analysis. I thus present methodological approaches hitherto perceived to be different in emphases or interests as complementary rather than at odds with one another. Second, I take up and reexamine the notions of network and frame as developed within the specific context of Japanese social organization. Third, I make a statement in favour of anthropological studies of business as a means of understanding how industries and organizations function in a global economy.

A business anthropological approach to the study of values: Evaluative practices in ceramic art

This article describes and analyses preparations for the holding of an anthropologist potters one-man show in a Japanese department store. It has two aims: first, to show the methodological and analytical strengths of business anthropology and second, to propose a sociological theory of multiple values that goes beyond economists’ simplified theory of value that is dependent solely on price. Based on participant observation, the article describes the strategic planning of, and preparations for, the fieldworkers own pottery exhibition in a department store located in northern Kyushu, the southernmost of Japans four main islands and home to a long tradition of porcelain and stoneware production. In so doing, it focuses on the main players in the ceramic art world; the social interaction underpinning an exhibition; the conflicting ideals of ‘aesthetics’, display and money (pricing); and the ways in which different sets of values, and evaluating processes, affected the reception of the authors work. It concludes by developing a theory of values that could be usefully applied in fields such as cultural economics, consumer theory and design research.

Economic and cultural production as structural paradox: the case of international fashion magazine publishing

This paper examines four international fashion magazines – Elle, Harpers Bazaar, Marie Claire and Vogue – published in five countries around the world. Based on content analysis, publishers’ marketing data, and interviews with editorial and publishing staff, the paper argues that the field of magazine production is structured by a double- or multiple-audience property which leads to structural homology in the fields of media production generally. Precisely because fashion magazines are simultaneously commodities and cultural productions, in which the not-entirely-separate interests of advertisers, the fashion world and readers come into play, all kinds of contradictions emerge to affect their contents. Focusing on international edition launches and magazines markets, the paper also engages with the meaning of journalistic independence and gives its own Gallic twist to globalisation theory.

Magical Names: Glamour, Enchantment, and Illusion in Women’s Fashion Magazines

This chapter is about the role of women’s fashion magazines in creating and sustaining the fashion industry as a magical network, primarily through naming practices. Those working for fashion magazines are specialists and experts in a particular branch of magic which makes use of glamour, enchantment, and illusion to form “a community of faith” in the power of “style.” The rhetoric of fashion magazines creates a seamless web of magical names from different political, economic, and cultural realms, through a masterful language of illusion. These names (of designers, celebrities, fashion houses, models, photographers, etc.) are like magical modes of thought in that they form an implicitly coherent system of seemingly magical connections between genres, styles, materials, texts, and culture, on the one hand, and advertising, brands, and the economy, on the other. They can thus be said to form a name economy.

Magical Capitalism: An Introduction

The word “magic” refers to a broad range of beliefs that include animism, charms, fantasies, illusion, miracles, the occult, superstition, and trickery. The Introduction to Magical Capitalism argues that, far from being confined to so-called primitive societies, magic exists in the midst of modern life, operating as a network of actors, language, materials, meanings, media, representations, and skills. Through a judicious mix of theoretical approaches and ethnographic vignettes, it develops earlier anthropologists’ arguments that magic is a result of uncertainty; that it relies on skill in performance and the use of magical words; that it has a symbiotic relationship with technology and its enchantment; and that it makes use of mimesis and transformations to achieve the ends of politicians, financiers, lawyers, businessmen, advertisers, marketers, fashion designers, architects, and writers of science fiction.

Performing the EU referendum: A view from afar

This editorial makes use of the EU Referendum to discuss the presence of magic in contemporary societies. It analysis magic in terms of magicians, magical representations, and magical rites – as originally expounded by Malinowski and Mauss – and argues that magic is to be found not only in political activities, but also in the worlds of finance, medicine, law, media, and various forms of cultural production.