The practice of fashion memes is a rather fresh exercise on the fashion scene, and it has been enjoyed by both the audiences and the brands. Fashion media have turned their attention to the phenomenon as well, addressing its scope, authorship and function from various angles. Scholarly research of the field is very scarce, though. The article seeks to contribute to the emerging field of fashion meme research by analysing a Lithuanian author of original fashion memes, a self-proclaimed fashion critic the Pink Poodle – an imaginary social media personality active on Facebook and Instagram platforms. The subjects of Pink Poodle memes are objects of media photographs from local and global public events (such as the Presidential Inauguration or an international cinema festival opening, Grammy Awards, Oscars) that demonstrate, from Poodle’s perspective, disagreements with fashion and/or aesthetics in general. The aim of the article is to reflect on the function of irony and sarcasm of the fashion meme as an instrument for fashion criticism, and the role of (visual) irony on the perception of fashion in the contemporary society. The text also addresses the role of independent fashion criticism that the practice of fashion meme creation seems to provide, and the function that this kind of intermediary between fashion and its audiences may perform.
Bakhtin, M. (1984). Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Barton, M. H., Stein, K. A., Church, S.H. (2020). ‘The disruptive power of memes: The carnivalesque and Kevin Spacey’s place in the Weinstein moment’. Relevant Rhetoric. Vol. 2, pp. 1-21.
Bauman, Z. (2011). Culture in a Liquid Modern World. 1st Edition. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bourdieu P. (1993). ‘Haute culture and haute couture’. Sociology in Question. London: Sage, pp. 132–138.
Campbell, J. (2020). ‘Out of vogue: Print in decline’. thesaint.scot, 20 Feb.
https://www.thesaint.scot/2020/02/out-of-vogue-print-in-decline/. Accessed 28 Aug. 2021.
Castells, M. (1996). The Network Society. The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Vol. 1. Maiden/Oxford: Blackwell.
Colebrook, C. (2004). Irony. London and New York: Routledge.
Denisova, A. (2020). Internet Memes and Society: Social, Cultural, and Political Contexts. London and New York: Routledge.
Dynel, M. (2016). ‘“I has seen image macros!” Advice Animal memes as visual-verbal jokes’. International Journal of Communication 10, pp. 660–688.
Eror, A. (2017). ‘Why Demna Gvasalia is the first designer to truly understand Internet culture’. highsnobiety.com, 31 Jul. https://www.highsnobiety.com/2017/07/31/demna-gvasalia-vetements-irony/. Accessed 23 March 2020.
Ferrier, M. (2019). ‘What does it meme? The rise and rise of the fashion viral’. TheGuardian.com, 16 Feb. https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2019/feb/16/what-does-it-meme-the-rise-and-rise-of-the-fashion-viral/. Accessed 5 May 2021.
Fiske, J. (2011 [1989]). Understanding Popular Culture. 2nd edition. London and New York: Routledge.
Foucault, M. (1981). ‘The order of the discourse’, in Young, R. (ed.). Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader. Boston: Routledge and Kegan and Paul.
Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Transl. by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books.
Hammond, J. L. (2020). ‘Carnival against the Capital of Capital: Carnivalesque protest in occupy Wall Street.’ Journal of Festive Studies 2 (1), pp. 265—288. https://doi.org/10.33823/jfs.2020.2.1.47.
Hart, M. (2007). ‘Humour and social protest: An introduction’. International Review of Social History 52, pp. 1–20.. DOI: 10.1017/S0020859007003094.
Horkheimer, M. & Adorno, Th. W. (2002). Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Huntington, H. E. (2013). ‘Subversive memes: Internet memes as a form of visual rhetoric’. Selected Papers of Internet Research 3. No page numbers.
Jenkins, R. (1994). Subversive Laughter: The Liberating Power of Comedy. Free Press; 1st edition.
Kim, K. W. (2020). ‘A case study on the contemporary fashion meme.’ The Research Journal of the Costume Culture 28 (3), pp. 330-343.
Magill J. R., Jr. (2007). Chic Ironic Bitterness. The University of Michigan Press.
Manovich, L. (2019). The aesthetic society, or “How I edit my Instagram”. http://manovich.net/index.php/projects/the-aesthetic-society. Accessed 5 May 2021.
Mina, A. X. (2012). ‘Hong Kong citizens’ online, memetic protest.’ 88 Bar [blog]. http://www.88-bar.com/2012/09/hong-kong-citizens-online-memetic-protest/. Accessed 18 Aug. 2021.
Scott, B. (2004). ‘Picturing irony: The subversive power of photography’. Visual Communication 3 (1), pp. 31-59.
Shifman, L. (2013). ‘Memes in a digital world: Reconciling with a conceptual troublemaker’. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 18, pp. 362–377.
Skjulstad, S. (2018). ‘Vetements, memes, and connectivity: Fashion media in the era of Instagram’. Fashion Theory 24 (2), pp. 181-209.
Stankevičiūtė, K. (2021). ‘Memetic genres of visual irony: Deconstructing the Pink Poodle fashion memes’. LOGOS 108, pp.151-165.
Swale, S. (2017). ‘Fashion blogging: Audience participation and new fashion discourses’. Scope: (Art & Design) 13, pp. 102-107.
Tobitt, Ch. (2019). ‘Women’s mags ABCs: Cosmopolitan sees biggest circulation fall + full figures’. Pressgazette.co.uk. 15 Aug.. https://www.pressgazette.co.uk/womens-mags-abcs-cosmopolitan-sees-biggest-circulation-fall-full-figures/. Accessed 28 Aug. 2021.
Wiggins, B. E. (2019). The Discursive Power of Memes in Digital Culture Ideology, Semiotics, and Intertextuality. New York: Routledge.
Williams, B. T. (2012). ‘The world on your screen: New media, remix, and the politics of cross-cultural contact’, in Williams, B. T. & Zenger, A. A. (eds.), New Media Literacies and Participatory Popular Culture Across Borders. New York: Routledge. pp. 17-32.
Other sources
Conversation with Pink Poodle author collective, Messenger format, 29 July 2021.
Discussion lecture “Fashion, opinion and social networks”. Pink Poodle collective with Marija Palaikytė. Kazimieras Simonavičius University, 27 March 2019.
Zmones.lt „Kas tas Rožinis Pudelis su savo feisbuko paskyra „Mama, žiūrėk, aš – Selebriti“? 10 September 2017 https://www.zmones.lt/naujiena/kas-tas-rozinis-pudelis-su-savo-feisbuko-paskyra-mama-ziurek-as-selebriti.7b364d89-9adf-11e8-9f90-aa000054c883#) Accessed 13 Aug. 2021.
