Vogue Archive

On the heels of last month's Fashion Week we are happy to welcome a new addition to the Penn Library website,  The Vogue Archive. 

The Vogue Archive contains the entire run of Vogue magazine (US edition) from 1892 to the present day, reproduced in high-resolution color page images. More than 400,000 pages are included, constituting a treasure trove of the work from the greatest designers, photographers, stylists and illustrators of the 20th and 21st centuries. Vogue is a unique record of American and international popular culture that extends beyond fashion. The Vogue Archive is an essential primary source for the study of fashion, gender and modern social history – past, present and future.
 
The database will allow fashion design and photography students to find inspirational images, but will also cater for academic study. Fashion marketing students will be able to research the history of a brand identity by viewing every advertisement for a brand such as Revlon, Coty, Versace or Chanel between specified dates. Researchers in cultural studies and gender studies will be able to explore themes such as body image, gender roles and social tastes from the 1890s to the present.  --Proquest

What's really great is that as historical as the archive is, it will continually be current, that is, the latest issue will be added each month with no embargo period (thank you Conde Nast!). Users can search on all text, captions, and titles throughout the magazine, including advertisements and covers.

Media Industries Research--Business Press and Trade Journal Resources

The resource environment keeps improving for the study of media industries from an historical perspective. Penn's recent subscription to the  Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive, which covers core US and UK trade magazines in film, music, broadcasting and theater from the early 1900s forward, comes to mind. (See blog post from November 2012). Last year saw the addition of the Vogue Archive whose pages, because its editors always had their eye on more than fashion, have much to contribute to media industry studies.  There is also the admirable open access Media History Digital Library's Lantern database of digitized classic media periodicals in the public domain which I described here this past August.

In addition to these, I was reminded of the solid offerings of trade journals of the last few decades that we rely on Dow Jones Factiva and EBSCO's Communication and Mass Media Complete serving up to us, when I ran across this article in the current Communication, Culture & Critique by Kenton T. Wilkinson and Patrick F. Merle called The Merits and Challenges of Using Business Press and Trade Journal Reports in Academic Research on Media Industries.

ABSTRACT
This article argues that media researchers should pay closer attention to the benefits and potential pitfalls of using business press and industry trade journal reports to inform academic research. To date, the use of these secondary sources in scholarly research concerning media industries has received little interest, as demonstrated in a preliminary examination of how academic literature and research methods textbooks treat the business press and trade journal reports. The authors call for a dialogue on this significant oversight, and offer suggestions for how researchers might begin addressing it as media across the globe grow in scope and influence during the 21st century.