Magazines & Materiality

The topic I would like to work on for my exhibit is the digitization of fashion magazines. As these magazines are converted from print into websites or mobile applications, what changes are made to their form and content in order to suit a medium that lacks the materiality of paper? To which conventions of print do they still adhere? In applications like Issuu or Zinio, “concerns about paratexts, frames, folds, borders, margins, authorship and authority” continue to be of importance as features that signify the look and feel of a magazine are replicated on the screen. I am singling out fashion magazines in particular because a main purpose of them is to get people to buy the clothes in the advertisements. When these ad pages become clickable on a screen, it results in an exacerbation of commodity fetishism by making a potential purchase that much easier for the reader/customer.

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