Representation of Female Images in Fashion Magazine:
A Case Study of ELLE
Table of Contents
1. Introduction ..................................................................... 错误！未定义书签。
2. Literature review............................................................................................... 1
3. Methodology ..................................................................................................... 3
4. Findings ............................................................................................................. 4
5. Conclusion ........................................................................................................ 6
6. Bibliography ...................................................................................................... 7
1. Introduction
With the new round of market openness, economic growth and social stratification in international society, female fashion magazines have rapidly and widely attracted a large amount of young females around the world. Through the promotion of female image, fashion and consumption, these magazines even become important “textbooks” for those female readers to gain gender identity and class identity.
The researcher chooses ELLE, a Paris-based international magazine as a case study, to find out how fashion magazine represents female roles and gender implication, and what the complicated relationship is between media and social gender reflected by fashion magazine’s construction of female image.
2. Literature review
From the broadest sense, cultural production in mass society is the production of symbols. The most common symbolic expression method of fashion magazines is metaphor. They play as the textbooks of middle class women’s gender technology and provide middle class identity imagination (Frith et al, 2005).
The first key metaphor is female gender technology. Earliest female magazines existed in the 1760s. After the World War II, female fashion magazines developed rapidly (Frith et al, 2005). For example, since the establishment in 1945, ELLE has always targeted at middle and upper class females (Cakir, 2014). Its contents cover fashion, clothes, communication with the opposite sex, travel, etc. ELLE usually presents as a professional fashion critic with elegant taste, and stresses the temperament of women, and define middle class female identity through specific image, fashion and lifestyle.
Fashion magazines show great passion to fashion products such as clothes
and accessories. Their objective is to discipline the female body. The bourgeoisie divided public and private sphere, and drove women to the private sphere. When women are just the visible correlation of men’s economic and social status, their value is just acting as the accessory or luxury of upper class males (Frith et al, 2005). During the process of learning to be more feminine, natural attribute of female body and female representation technology become contradictory, thus fashionable clothes, weight-loss and beauty industry appear on modern industry stage. Fashion and other technology of body discipline are combined with education, authenticity and criticism (Frith et al, 2005). They encourage females to change their bodies into socialized bodies. For instance, fashion magazines teach women how to become women through the promotion of fashion products can shape beautiful female bodies and temperament. When females are forced to link closely with leisure and decoration, their femaleness is defined as the representation and acceptance form of female body, their personality and identity have to be measured by appearance (Markula, 2001).
The second metaphor of fashion magazines is the middleclass identity. Modern magazines are formed and developed along with the existence and progress of middle class and their culture
(Polivy & Herman, 2004). The whole process includes a series of social practices and cultural adaptation practices, an important symbol is the division of public and private sphere. In order to distinguish themselves from other lower groups, the emerging middle class created corresponding sharing value and specific practices in private sphere (Polivy & Herman, 2004). The most prominent is the setting of new gender relationships, namely women should be specially engaged in social intercourse and housework. Middle class women were the first group of women who left public sphere and focused on family roles (Tiggemann & McGill, 2004).
Fashion magazines regulate what behavior, role and emotion middle class women should have (Grabe et al, 2008). Proprietary of these values,
expectations and behaviors are the representation of common economic or political interest, as well as the sense of identity to the certain social group (Moeran, 2006). As long as leisure is still an expensive good for people, for most women, specially being engaged with social intercourse and dressing up is still a desire. In fact, taste of bourgeois culture expresses enthusiasm and considerateness to women, but is unwilling to give them enough freedom (Moeran, 2006). Even till today, political, economic and social status of women is inferior to that of men. Historical studies remind people that females’ middle class identity is obtained at the cost of their losing subjectivity.
3. Methodology
In order to gain enough information, the researcher will use both primary and secondary researcher methods, including reviewing literature and online materials and analyzing original magazine resources (Jensen, 2013). Analyzing original magazine resources may be the most appropriate method, because it is a direct way to know how ELLE magazine expresses female images. The research will visit the school library, online databases like Google Scholar and ELLE’s official website, and th e researcher will fully use critical reading, thinking and analyzing skills learned from relevant courses to conduct the research.
The researcher conducted structural and theoretical samplings to all published ELLE magazines (British edition) from 2011-2014. Among 16 samplings, 554 female characters exist in 223 articles, articles with female characters occupy 41.5% of all articles. Generally, female images in ELLE are mainly divided into two types: family role (girlfriend, wife, mother, daughter, consumer of daily goods etc.) and social role (working women such as actresses and models). There are 345 family roles, accounting for 62.3% of the total, images in the identity of sex object occupy 95.7%. There are 209 social roles, accounting for
45% of the total female characters. More importantly, 159 professional actresses and models occupy 76% of all social roles. Almost all of them are fashion spokespersons, luxury consumers, wives and lovers. After work, most of them are still typical family roles. Though ELLE has broken through traditional gender division of labor, only 4.3% female images are engaged in creative work. In fact, the proportion of female family roles in ELLE is as large as 98.4%.
Concrete articles in ELLE further show how the magazine shapes and emphasizes “feminity”. An article called Angel, please comb your feathers well teaches a young beauty how to dress up. The author instantly picks out 10 mistakes of the beautiful girl, such as her underwear is improper, signs of bra and underpants can be seen clearly; the girl’s belly is a little swelling, which becomes more evident beneath her tight silk dress; heel skin is rough; forgetting using the lip liner etc. (McKee, 2012). In order to highlight the unforgiveness of these mistakes, this girl lost the great opportunity of screen test for next Hollywood blockbuster (McKee, 2012). In another article What to wear to a job interview, the interviewee is good at dressing up, she specially wear a unique a silk scarf with a famous luxury brand, this scarf helps her conquer the interviewers and win her the ideal job offer (Smith, 2012).
4. Findings
From the spread of occupation, it can be found that female family and emotional roles occupy near 50%. Besides, it seems that there are many working women, but most of them are actresses, models and professionals in entertainment industry. Real social roles only account for 3.45%. Therefore, ELLE severely strengthens traditional division of labor and females’ family and emotional roles. Its role expectations to females are pretty, young, pursuing luxury consumption, valuing love and doing traditional female occupations.
Female identity was constructed by ELLE (Moeran, 2006). The so-called feminity or womanliness reflected and strengthened by ELLE is the result of gender bipartition based on a series of binary values. During the process, ELLE reconstructs the notions of what is masculine or feminine.
Undoubtedly, ELLE is just like a feast of female fashion. Decided by its form, core content of ELLE is using fashion to teach young females female technology and then build their social images, such as body training and dress collocation rules. Social identity and sexual identity of a female is how she uses clothes and accessories to represent her body. That is to say, when clothes, cosmetics and family represent women’s personality and social status, their bodies become the tool of self-management and body politics (Polivy & Herman, 2004).
Both of the two articles mentioned above evacuate all political, economic, cultural, educational, historical factors in real life, but subtly transform personal success and opportunity into natural and physiological factors, in order to attach commodity symbols on clothing or a certain fashion brand. The two articles were written by women and discuss about female dressing. In the myth of putting female destiny and fashion at the equal position, a sexual ideology is implied that value of women is to be seen, temperament of women is constructed by their clothes, and quality of women is also presented by the management of their clothes to them. However, moral character, knowledge and skill of women are all ignored. When clothes become a kind of body politics, a kind of renewable resource, clothes become another extreme of people’s sociality, therefore strong gender characteristics are shown.
Ideology is ubiquitous. Just as Roland Barthes proposed, fashion is actually playing with a serious theme, who am I?(Rocamora, 2009) In terms of the metaphor of female gender technology, it can be found that modern females need to create a new set of symbolic value under the more prosperous market and larger self-determination space. While dressing-up and clothes are the most convenient symbolic representation to dominate body and change
environment (Tiggemann & McGill, 2004). For working class females who desire to change their occupational identity, as fashion symbolizes wealth and leisure, reading fashion magazines and learning to dress up become a class challenge. When individuals cannot gain identification from history, culture, class, family even sex, they can only enter the dizziness of fashion, as it shapes powerful identification and sense of belonging, giving people much sense of security and comfort (Vernette, 2004). Democracy represented by the cross-class popularity of fashion and fashion magazine is just a false illusion which hides the inequality of wealth and opportunity. On the one hand, fashion culture always cannot break through the limitation of age; one the other hand, most females who are not beautiful enough are “evaporated” collectively.
Maybe the latter metaphor is much more dangerous. Middle class is the outcome of expansion of modern capitalism. The larger gap between the rich and the poor is because redistributed power and market form an unusual force to push social inequality. Obviously, the middle class identity provided by ELLE is originated from the motive of commercial profit. Through the identification of consumerism, ELLE induces females to limit themselves in material, affection and stereotyped images, thus covers the social inequality and relieve lower class’ anxiety in endless pursuit for fashion (Cusumano & Thompson, 1997). Indeed, ELLE produces new female images who are independent, rich, well-educated and have huge consumption power, however ideology and mass culture just take advantage of such identity, and rationalize the fact of gender inequality in the name of gender difference, so as to make females willingly serve their demands.
5. Conclusion
All in all, through the case study of ELLE, representation of female roles in fashion magazine is through the metaphors of female gender technology and middle class identity textbooks. Through body technology like clothes and
cosmetics, fashion magazine enhances gender personality, cover and reproduce social inequality and gender inequality.
With the development of economic globalization, female groups were never full of vitality like today. They have abundant self-consciousness and feminine consciousness, as well as desire for self-determination and development (Craik, 1993). However, female development also faces unprecedented dilemma today. Enterprises and media find out “ideal” female body and temperament to induce women to pursue fashion, willingly to be commercialized and materialized, so as to trigger consumption, and relieve all kinds of social pressure. Critically analyzing media speculation of middle class, female image and temperament allow people to gain an alert to media, knowledge, education and habit, so as to rethink females’ development road.
6. Bibliography Craik, J. 1993. The face of fashion: Cultural studies in fashion. Routledge. pp. 10-177.
Cusumano, D. L., & Thompson, J. K. 1997. Body image and body shape ideals in magazines: Exposure, awareness, and internalization. Sex Roles, 37(9), pp. 701-721.
Cakir, E. 2014. Do you know about the history of Elle magazine? Available at: Retrieved on May 1st 2014.
Frith, K., Shaw, P ., & Cheng, H. 2005. The Construction of Beauty: A Cross ‐Cultural Analysis of Women's Magazine Advertising. Journal of Communication , 55(1), pp. 56-70.
Grabe, S., Ward, L. M., & Hyde, J. S. 2008. The role of the media in body image concerns among women: a meta-analysis of experimental and correlational studies. Psychological bulletin, 134(3), pp. 460.
Grandpierre, K. 2013. How ELLE magazine conquered the world. On INA Global website. Available at:
Retrieved on May 1st 2014.
Jensen, K. B. (Ed.). 2013. A handbook of media and communication research: qualitative and quantitative methodologies. Routledge. pp. 1-56.
Lindner, K. 2004. Images of women in general interest and fashion magazine advertisements from 1955 to 2002. Sex Roles, 51(7-8), pp. 409-421.
Markula, P. 2001. Beyond the Perfect Body Women’s Body Image Distortion in Fitness Magazine Discourse. Journal of Sport & Social Issues , 25(2), pp. 158-179.
McKee, L. 2012. Angel, please comb your feathers well . ELLE. 12(9). pp. 88-90.
Moeran, B. 2006. More than just a fashion magazine. Current Sociology, 54(5), pp. 725-744.
Polivy, J., & Herman, C. P. 2004. Sociocultural idealization of thin female body shapes: An introduction to the special issue on body image and eating disorders. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 23(1), pp. 1-6.
Rocamora, A. 2009. Fashioning the City: Paris, Fashion and the Media . IB Tauris & Company Limited. pp. 1-248.
Smith, C. 2012. What to wear to a job interview?. ELLE. 13(7). pp.35-36.
Tiggemann, M., & McGill, B. 2004. The role of social comparison in the effect of magazine advertisements on women's mood and body dissatisfaction. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 23(1), pp. 23-44.
Vernette, E. 2004. Targeting women's clothing fashion opinion leaders in media planning: an application for magazines. Journal of Advertising Research, 44(1), pp. 90-107.
9
Representation of Female Images in Fashion Magazine:
A Case Study of ELLE
Table of Contents
1. Introduction ..................................................................... 错误！未定义书签。
2. Literature review............................................................................................... 1
3. Methodology ..................................................................................................... 3
4. Findings ............................................................................................................. 4
5. Conclusion ........................................................................................................ 6
6. Bibliography ...................................................................................................... 7
1. Introduction
With the new round of market openness, economic growth and social stratification in international society, female fashion magazines have rapidly and widely attracted a large amount of young females around the world. Through the promotion of female image, fashion and consumption, these magazines even become important “textbooks” for those female readers to gain gender identity and class identity.
The researcher chooses ELLE, a Paris-based international magazine as a case study, to find out how fashion magazine represents female roles and gender implication, and what the complicated relationship is between media and social gender reflected by fashion magazine’s construction of female image.
2. Literature review
From the broadest sense, cultural production in mass society is the production of symbols. The most common symbolic expression method of fashion magazines is metaphor. They play as the textbooks of middle class women’s gender technology and provide middle class identity imagination (Frith et al, 2005).
The first key metaphor is female gender technology. Earliest female magazines existed in the 1760s. After the World War II, female fashion magazines developed rapidly (Frith et al, 2005). For example, since the establishment in 1945, ELLE has always targeted at middle and upper class females (Cakir, 2014). Its contents cover fashion, clothes, communication with the opposite sex, travel, etc. ELLE usually presents as a professional fashion critic with elegant taste, and stresses the temperament of women, and define middle class female identity through specific image, fashion and lifestyle.
Fashion magazines show great passion to fashion products such as clothes
and accessories. Their objective is to discipline the female body. The bourgeoisie divided public and private sphere, and drove women to the private sphere. When women are just the visible correlation of men’s economic and social status, their value is just acting as the accessory or luxury of upper class males (Frith et al, 2005). During the process of learning to be more feminine, natural attribute of female body and female representation technology become contradictory, thus fashionable clothes, weight-loss and beauty industry appear on modern industry stage. Fashion and other technology of body discipline are combined with education, authenticity and criticism (Frith et al, 2005). They encourage females to change their bodies into socialized bodies. For instance, fashion magazines teach women how to become women through the promotion of fashion products can shape beautiful female bodies and temperament. When females are forced to link closely with leisure and decoration, their femaleness is defined as the representation and acceptance form of female body, their personality and identity have to be measured by appearance (Markula, 2001).
The second metaphor of fashion magazines is the middleclass identity. Modern magazines are formed and developed along with the existence and progress of middle class and their culture
(Polivy & Herman, 2004). The whole process includes a series of social practices and cultural adaptation practices, an important symbol is the division of public and private sphere. In order to distinguish themselves from other lower groups, the emerging middle class created corresponding sharing value and specific practices in private sphere (Polivy & Herman, 2004). The most prominent is the setting of new gender relationships, namely women should be specially engaged in social intercourse and housework. Middle class women were the first group of women who left public sphere and focused on family roles (Tiggemann & McGill, 2004).
Fashion magazines regulate what behavior, role and emotion middle class women should have (Grabe et al, 2008). Proprietary of these values,
expectations and behaviors are the representation of common economic or political interest, as well as the sense of identity to the certain social group (Moeran, 2006). As long as leisure is still an expensive good for people, for most women, specially being engaged with social intercourse and dressing up is still a desire. In fact, taste of bourgeois culture expresses enthusiasm and considerateness to women, but is unwilling to give them enough freedom (Moeran, 2006). Even till today, political, economic and social status of women is inferior to that of men. Historical studies remind people that females’ middle class identity is obtained at the cost of their losing subjectivity.
3. Methodology
In order to gain enough information, the researcher will use both primary and secondary researcher methods, including reviewing literature and online materials and analyzing original magazine resources (Jensen, 2013). Analyzing original magazine resources may be the most appropriate method, because it is a direct way to know how ELLE magazine expresses female images. The research will visit the school library, online databases like Google Scholar and ELLE’s official website, and th e researcher will fully use critical reading, thinking and analyzing skills learned from relevant courses to conduct the research.
The researcher conducted structural and theoretical samplings to all published ELLE magazines (British edition) from 2011-2014. Among 16 samplings, 554 female characters exist in 223 articles, articles with female characters occupy 41.5% of all articles. Generally, female images in ELLE are mainly divided into two types: family role (girlfriend, wife, mother, daughter, consumer of daily goods etc.) and social role (working women such as actresses and models). There are 345 family roles, accounting for 62.3% of the total, images in the identity of sex object occupy 95.7%. There are 209 social roles, accounting for
45% of the total female characters. More importantly, 159 professional actresses and models occupy 76% of all social roles. Almost all of them are fashion spokespersons, luxury consumers, wives and lovers. After work, most of them are still typical family roles. Though ELLE has broken through traditional gender division of labor, only 4.3% female images are engaged in creative work. In fact, the proportion of female family roles in ELLE is as large as 98.4%.
Concrete articles in ELLE further show how the magazine shapes and emphasizes “feminity”. An article called Angel, please comb your feathers well teaches a young beauty how to dress up. The author instantly picks out 10 mistakes of the beautiful girl, such as her underwear is improper, signs of bra and underpants can be seen clearly; the girl’s belly is a little swelling, which becomes more evident beneath her tight silk dress; heel skin is rough; forgetting using the lip liner etc. (McKee, 2012). In order to highlight the unforgiveness of these mistakes, this girl lost the great opportunity of screen test for next Hollywood blockbuster (McKee, 2012). In another article What to wear to a job interview, the interviewee is good at dressing up, she specially wear a unique a silk scarf with a famous luxury brand, this scarf helps her conquer the interviewers and win her the ideal job offer (Smith, 2012).
4. Findings
From the spread of occupation, it can be found that female family and emotional roles occupy near 50%. Besides, it seems that there are many working women, but most of them are actresses, models and professionals in entertainment industry. Real social roles only account for 3.45%. Therefore, ELLE severely strengthens traditional division of labor and females’ family and emotional roles. Its role expectations to females are pretty, young, pursuing luxury consumption, valuing love and doing traditional female occupations.
Female identity was constructed by ELLE (Moeran, 2006). The so-called feminity or womanliness reflected and strengthened by ELLE is the result of gender bipartition based on a series of binary values. During the process, ELLE reconstructs the notions of what is masculine or feminine.
Undoubtedly, ELLE is just like a feast of female fashion. Decided by its form, core content of ELLE is using fashion to teach young females female technology and then build their social images, such as body training and dress collocation rules. Social identity and sexual identity of a female is how she uses clothes and accessories to represent her body. That is to say, when clothes, cosmetics and family represent women’s personality and social status, their bodies become the tool of self-management and body politics (Polivy & Herman, 2004).
Both of the two articles mentioned above evacuate all political, economic, cultural, educational, historical factors in real life, but subtly transform personal success and opportunity into natural and physiological factors, in order to attach commodity symbols on clothing or a certain fashion brand. The two articles were written by women and discuss about female dressing. In the myth of putting female destiny and fashion at the equal position, a sexual ideology is implied that value of women is to be seen, temperament of women is constructed by their clothes, and quality of women is also presented by the management of their clothes to them. However, moral character, knowledge and skill of women are all ignored. When clothes become a kind of body politics, a kind of renewable resource, clothes become another extreme of people’s sociality, therefore strong gender characteristics are shown.
Ideology is ubiquitous. Just as Roland Barthes proposed, fashion is actually playing with a serious theme, who am I?(Rocamora, 2009) In terms of the metaphor of female gender technology, it can be found that modern females need to create a new set of symbolic value under the more prosperous market and larger self-determination space. While dressing-up and clothes are the most convenient symbolic representation to dominate body and change
environment (Tiggemann & McGill, 2004). For working class females who desire to change their occupational identity, as fashion symbolizes wealth and leisure, reading fashion magazines and learning to dress up become a class challenge. When individuals cannot gain identification from history, culture, class, family even sex, they can only enter the dizziness of fashion, as it shapes powerful identification and sense of belonging, giving people much sense of security and comfort (Vernette, 2004). Democracy represented by the cross-class popularity of fashion and fashion magazine is just a false illusion which hides the inequality of wealth and opportunity. On the one hand, fashion culture always cannot break through the limitation of age; one the other hand, most females who are not beautiful enough are “evaporated” collectively.
Maybe the latter metaphor is much more dangerous. Middle class is the outcome of expansion of modern capitalism. The larger gap between the rich and the poor is because redistributed power and market form an unusual force to push social inequality. Obviously, the middle class identity provided by ELLE is originated from the motive of commercial profit. Through the identification of consumerism, ELLE induces females to limit themselves in material, affection and stereotyped images, thus covers the social inequality and relieve lower class’ anxiety in endless pursuit for fashion (Cusumano & Thompson, 1997). Indeed, ELLE produces new female images who are independent, rich, well-educated and have huge consumption power, however ideology and mass culture just take advantage of such identity, and rationalize the fact of gender inequality in the name of gender difference, so as to make females willingly serve their demands.
5. Conclusion
All in all, through the case study of ELLE, representation of female roles in fashion magazine is through the metaphors of female gender technology and middle class identity textbooks. Through body technology like clothes and
cosmetics, fashion magazine enhances gender personality, cover and reproduce social inequality and gender inequality.
With the development of economic globalization, female groups were never full of vitality like today. They have abundant self-consciousness and feminine consciousness, as well as desire for self-determination and development (Craik, 1993). However, female development also faces unprecedented dilemma today. Enterprises and media find out “ideal” female body and temperament to induce women to pursue fashion, willingly to be commercialized and materialized, so as to trigger consumption, and relieve all kinds of social pressure. Critically analyzing media speculation of middle class, female image and temperament allow people to gain an alert to media, knowledge, education and habit, so as to rethink females’ development road.
6. Bibliography Craik, J. 1993. The face of fashion: Cultural studies in fashion. Routledge. pp. 10-177.
Cusumano, D. L., & Thompson, J. K. 1997. Body image and body shape ideals in magazines: Exposure, awareness, and internalization. Sex Roles, 37(9), pp. 701-721.
Cakir, E. 2014. Do you know about the history of Elle magazine? Available at: Retrieved on May 1st 2014.
Frith, K., Shaw, P ., & Cheng, H. 2005. The Construction of Beauty: A Cross ‐Cultural Analysis of Women's Magazine Advertising. Journal of Communication , 55(1), pp. 56-70.
Grabe, S., Ward, L. M., & Hyde, J. S. 2008. The role of the media in body image concerns among women: a meta-analysis of experimental and correlational studies. Psychological bulletin, 134(3), pp. 460.
Grandpierre, K. 2013. How ELLE magazine conquered the world. On INA Global website. Available at:
Retrieved on May 1st 2014.
Jensen, K. B. (Ed.). 2013. A handbook of media and communication research: qualitative and quantitative methodologies. Routledge. pp. 1-56.
Lindner, K. 2004. Images of women in general interest and fashion magazine advertisements from 1955 to 2002. Sex Roles, 51(7-8), pp. 409-421.
Markula, P. 2001. Beyond the Perfect Body Women’s Body Image Distortion in Fitness Magazine Discourse. Journal of Sport & Social Issues , 25(2), pp. 158-179.
McKee, L. 2012. Angel, please comb your feathers well . ELLE. 12(9). pp. 88-90.
Moeran, B. 2006. More than just a fashion magazine. Current Sociology, 54(5), pp. 725-744.
Polivy, J., & Herman, C. P. 2004. Sociocultural idealization of thin female body shapes: An introduction to the special issue on body image and eating disorders. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 23(1), pp. 1-6.
Rocamora, A. 2009. Fashioning the City: Paris, Fashion and the Media . IB Tauris & Company Limited. pp. 1-248.
Smith, C. 2012. What to wear to a job interview?. ELLE. 13(7). pp.35-36.
Tiggemann, M., & McGill, B. 2004. The role of social comparison in the effect of magazine advertisements on women's mood and body dissatisfaction. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 23(1), pp. 23-44.
Vernette, E. 2004. Targeting women's clothing fashion opinion leaders in media planning: an application for magazines. Journal of Advertising Research, 44(1), pp. 90-107.
9