Looking for the TV Sound: Fashion, Identity and the Language of Music Video

Publication Type:
Thesis
Issue Date:
2024
Full metadata record
In the early 1980s, a globally dominant, late-capitalist anglophone youth media culture gave rise to a hybrid moving image form with a unique visual vocabulary: music video. This new media type swiftly influenced and redefined those adjacent fields from which its techniques were drawn: film, television, graphic design, art, and fashion. Just as fashion is quintessentially modern, a compelling cultural and commercial force of the last two hundred years, early music video is a model and mirror of the turning twentieth-century; its methods arise from the conditions of postmodernism, yet already forecast a post-postmodern structure of feeling. This thesis, Looking for the TV Sound, investigates the performance of fashioned gender identity in early music video, specifically the period 1980-1985. The research considers the construction of new fashion masculinities in music video, including the homosocial New Man and the female pop dandy, thus integrating music video within an expanding field of fashion studies. It asks: how did an assortment of British pop music performers, and the pioneering British and Australian directors with whom they collaborated, use the language of fashion to create the language of music video? Why was the presentation of n0n-conforming, glamorous and/or queer gender identity central to this? How was the immense international popularity of these artists permitted within the otherwise conservative structures of hegemonic masculinity in the neoliberal late twentieth-century, so tainted by homophobic terror during the HIV/AIDS crisis? And, in what ways do these cultural products, while specifically responsive to their originating historical period, arise from significant precedents yet are unique, something apparent in the visual quotation of early music video by present day fashion and media cultures? The thesis deeply describes a series of music videos by David Bowie, Wham! featuring George Michael, Duran Duran, and Eurythmics featuring Annie Lennox, in which sartorial cues are dominant markers of masculine performer/character identity. It contextualises the observations of its structural analysis by applying theories of fashion arising from art history, literature, sociology, cultural and gender studies. In doing so, Looking for the TV Sound finds the significant presence of Camp in the constitution of the works, notes the fashion influence of subcultural movements such as New Romanticism upon these flamboyant productions, and also locates power in the gaze of a significant post-war consumer group: the fan culture of the teenager, in particular the teenaged girl.
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