Stockholm fashion week, a fashion week for everyone? : A qualitative study that compares how the news articles and fashion-related articles depict Stockholm fashion week.

Abstract: With Stockholm fashion week being the largest fashion event in Sweden each fall, there are many expectations on how the event is being handled, from individuals within the industry and non-industry individuals as well. However, with the various societal and global issues that are connected to the fashion industry, such as negative environmental consequences, poor labor conditions in the manufacturing stage and the somewhat dubious natures that models have to endure. This, in turn, begs the question of whether a fashion event such as Stockholm fashion week can be sustainable. Even more important, How is Stockholm fashion week depicted by news articles from the fashion industry and Swedish news outlets? In addition to this broader research question, there also has to be an emphasis on how the different fields (Friedland, 2009) participating in the fashion event emerge with each other and how an individual's habitus (Bourdieu,1957) can be changed with fashion and fashion events.  This research, therefore, had as its aim, via qualitative content analysis as the method, to get a greater understanding of how Stockholm fashion week is being depicted by three fashion industry articles and three Swedish news outlets, in addition to getting a greater understanding of the fashion industry as a whole. By analyzing these articles, and the content within there would emerge patterns of which journalist behind the articles, elected to depict Stockholm fashion week in various manners. This resulted in depictions from journalists suggesting notions such as that Stockholm could be the new fashion capital of Scandinavia to journalists encouraging the readers to be more aware of the negative impacts of clothing and fashion.  These types of results could imply that a large part of the way that the fashion event was depicted was due to two notions. The first is that the journalist behind the article has somewhat free reins when it comes to the manner of content in the article, which can encourage non-individuals in both positive and negative ways. Secondly, is the notion that many journalists have to keep in consideration their profession as journalists (International Federation of Journalists (IFJ),(2019) when they mix up their journalistic field with the fashion field (Friedland,2009). Conclusively, the research gives a greater understanding of the Swedish fashion industry and the importance of the journalist and news, which could be even further researched in future projects.