时尚杂志中的女性形象分析(英语原创论文)

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,