Feuds within fashion houses, megalomaniacs and photoshoot nightmares - fashion and drama have been a perfect match for decades. Over the past ten years, we have witnessed a boom of documentaries about fashion magazine editors, fashion and media politics and the history of fashion houses. How and why did fashion documentaries and non-fiction media become so popular? Documenting Fashion explores and reassesses the role of documentary media by tracing its history in shaping our understanding of fashion across multiple platforms and different national contexts, including industrial films, newsreels, TV shows, documentary films, digital media and photography. The essays in this collection underpin and profile a scholarly space in which a dialogue between fashion and documentary studies can evolve by drawing from different methodologies and approaches, such as media and cultural studies, ethnography, archival and museum studies, gender studies, marketing and public relations.

Examines the politics of female authorship in relation to contemporary documentary practicesThis book, like its twin volume 'Female Authorship and the Documentary Image', centres on pressing issues in relation to female authorship in contemporary documentary practices. Addressing the politics of representation and authorship both behind and in front of the camera, a range of international scholars now expand the theoretical and practical framework informing the current scholarship on documentary cinema, which has so far neglected questions of gender.'Female Agency and Documentary Strategies' centres on how self-portraiture and contemporary documentary manifestations such as blogging and the prevalent usage of social media shape and inform female subjectivities and claims to truth. The book examines the scope of authorship and agency open to women using these technologies as a form of activism, centring on notions of relationality, selfhood and subjectivity, and includes interviews with Hong Kong based activist filmmaker and scholar Vivian Wenli Lin and Spanish documentarist Mercedes Alvarez.ContributorsAnna Backman Rogers, University of GothenburgLinda C. Ehrlich, Writer, Teacher, EditorKerreen Ely-Harper, Creative Media Researcher and Filmmaker Kristopher Fallon, University of California, DavisCadence Kinsey, University of YorkCarla Maia, Centro Universitario UNALidia Meras, Film Historian and ResearcherAnna Misiak, Falmouth UniversityKim Munro, Filmmaker, Artist and Teacher Kate Nash, University of LeedsJohn A. Riley, Woosong UniversityMonica Titton, University of Applied Arts and at the Academy of Fine Arts in ViennaBoel Ulfsdotter, Independent Scholar Gail Vanstone, York University, Toronto

This book, like its twin volume Female Authorship and the Documentary Image, centres on pressing issues in relation to female authorship in contemporary documentary practices. Addressing the politics of representation and authorship both behind and in front of the camera, a range of international scholars now expand the theoretical and practical framework informing the current scholarship on documentary cinema, which has so far neglected questions of gender. Female Agency and Documentary Strategies centres on how self-portraiture and contemporary documentary manifestations such as blogging and the prevalent usage of social media shape and inform female subjectivities and claims to truth. The book examines the scope of authorship and agency open to women using these technologies as a form of activism, centring on notions of relationality, selfhood and subjectivity, and includes interviews with Hong Kong based activist filmmaker and scholar Vivian Wenli Lin and Spanish documentarist Mercedes Alvarez.

This book, like its twin volume Female Authorship and Documentary Strategies, centres on pressing issues in relation to female authorship in contemporary documentary practices. Addressing the politics of representation and authorship both behind and in front of the camera, a range of international scholars now expand the theoretical and practical framework informing the current scholarship on documentary cinema, which has so far neglected questions of gender. Female Authorship and the Documentary Image engages with the relationship between female documentary filmmakers and the documentary image. With a thematic focus on the documentary image directly, within the more traditional arenas of theory and practice and especially within the context of gaze and author theory, the book also considers more philosophical questions of aesthetics, home and identity within the contexts of female subjectivity, globalisation and trauma. The book also includes a dialogue on two key photographers, Hannah Wilke and Jo Spence, as well as an interview with Taiwanese documentary filmmakers Singing Chen and Wuna Wu.

This two volume set investigates the theoretical and practical framework that informs scholarship on documentary film that has hitherto neglected questions of gender and female authorship. It examines a wide array of documentary phenomena through global and transnational case studies and interviews. It also place a special emphasis on the nature of both individual and collective filmmaking and the ways in which these dynamics inform documentary work.