Description
Although fashion images have been historically undertheorized in the field of international relations, they offer insights into how topics such as global security are simplified and universalized. They must resonate with the social imaginary but operate outside the traditional frameworks of state power and political economy. Visual fashion media therefore presents opportunities to critically engage with notions of national identity, global conflict, and security. A multimodal critical discourse analysis informed by Kress & Van Leeuwen’s (2020) grammar of visual design was undertaken using a series of case studies from fashion publications to explore how these discourses are culturally produced in popular consumer contexts and anchored to gendered, fashioned bodies. This paper argues that global security undergoes an aesthetic “softening” as it is absorbed into fashion contexts. This occurs via stylistic choices involving the casting, creative direction and captioning of the editorials. The displacement of violent conflict in favour of a professionalized, neoliberal vision of global security continues the condensation, commodification and convenient symbolic repackaging of political issues are for circulation in the marketplace.
