'On Location': re(viewing) bodies of fashion and places of desire

Abstract

The interconnected and globalized industries of tourism, fashion and the media are profound and unsuspected agents of cultural pedagogy and investigation of travel-fashion iconographies from a tourism studies perspective is overdue. In this article we explore discourses of tourism, place and gender as articulated in the lifestyle magazine Condé Nast Traveller. Based on a critical textual analysis, the article premises that the fashion features of such magazines form an element in the circle of representation and that their narratives are rooted in heteropatriarchal discourses embedded in imperialist conceptions of desire and the exotic. Analysis of a fashion feature photographed in Hong Kong reveals how the myths and fantasies privileged within the discourses of both the tourism and the fashion industries entwine, so that sexualized and stereotypical representations of women are seen to exoticize and eroticize tourism destinations, particularly Asia.