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Visualising Gender Bias: the Use of Visual Analysis to Examine Fashion Images of Women
Abstract
We are surrounded by images that show us idealised, feminine bodies—young, skinny, white, able-bodied women with luxurious blonde locks, pouting their moist, plump lips seductively at the camera, stretching out their lean, hairless limbs, barely dressed in tiny diaphanous garments. The fashion industry is a major culprit in this idealisation process, from runways to magazine covers, adverts to social media posts, these multiple sites help construct a narrow definition of the acceptable, beautiful body. This chapter explores visual analysis as a tool to enable critiques of the visual communication of the industry. Whilst there is academic research which critically assesses the fashion industry, and scholarly discussion about how to do visual analysis, there is little fashion literature that analyses imagery in a sustained way. The chapter provides a snapshot of the state of visual analysis in fashion studies and considers what tools might enable productive interpretation of entrenched gendered constructs.
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Sustainability is strongly becoming imperative for all fashion companies to respond to stakeholders’ concerns and meet their expectations. While companies are more and more engaged in sustainability practices regarding all the activities carried out, there is also a growing opportunity for them to communicate it to reinforce the brand through various means. One of these is undoubtedly represented by social media. The social media landscape is increasingly characterized by the use of images as a highly impactful way of communication, with image-based social media such as Instagram that are experiencing significant growth among consumers and businesses. Consequently, the paper aims to understand how sustainability is depicted through Instagram by sustainable fashion companies. For these reasons, the paper investigates the use of images on Instagram by two sustainable fashion brands, Patagonia and Stella McCartney. To this aim, the paper employs the visual content analysis on over 300 pictures downloaded from the two corporate accounts on Instagram. The findings show the most used image categories to depict sustainability, and how such categories generate online interaction with users in terms of digital engagement. Implications for sustainable fashion companies and social media managers are provided.
Based on research with eight to eleven-year-old girls from the South of England, I discuss the relationship between their clothes, identity, temporality, life course and the ageing process. Despite media accounts suggesting the passivity of pre-teen girls’ fashionable dress consumption, unknowingly becoming prematurely sexualised through hyper-feminine dress, by using the interlinking of materiality and life course as a lens to explore girls’ understanding of fashion, my research showed that girls engage with popular debates about age-appropriate dress. I demonstrate that the participants were aware of sexual generationing and explored older, hyper-feminine, sexualised identities at specific, socially-approved times. Most significantly, this materiality/life course approach offers new insights into how girls explore the past, present and the future, feeling the passing of time and the ageing process on their bodies, through the materiality of their clothes. It is through dress that girls come to understand age, temporality and where they are on their life course.
This article analyses the cultural construction of youth and beauty as socially dominant values through an interrogation of Colombian fashion magazines produced between 1970 and 1999. To this end, the article analyses the role of fashion and the textile industry – including brands, textile companies and designers – within this key period to understand the transformation of male and female values in the process of establishing youth as an imperative standard for appearance and behaviour. The methodology used is discourse analysis applied to visual and textual advertising published by fashion magazines during the aforementioned period, as a means to understand the ideals and values of fashion and its material culture. This article reveals the tensions between the historical construction of youth in Colombia and the textile and fashion industries, the de-differentiation of youth as a value in men and women, and the paradoxical ambiguity between the ephemeral logic of fashion and the eternal aspiration of youth. These issues have not been adequately explored with regard to Colombia yet.
Purpose
The study aims to examine female sexuality in marketing communications and how it shapes the millennial buying decisions in the fashion industry. The focus of the study is to connect fashion industry and marketing communication to understand how female sexuality influence buying behaviours and decisions of the millennial.
Design/methodology/approach
The study was underpinned by the dimensions of skin colour, brand image and market share in sexual appealing marketing communication, and the millennial in the study comprises youths between the age of 21and 40 years and demographically defined by Wells and Guber (1966) as bachelors, Full nests 1 and 2. Multistage stage sampling was used with a structured questionnaire.
Findings
Findings show that youths, 2019 buying decisions and behaviours are strategically influenced by different manifestations of female sexuality in the context of the study and equally affect market share and patronage.
Research limitations/implications
The study shows what shapes the marketing communication strategies of the rising fashion industry but is limited to the millennial buying decisions and not the larger fashion industry consumers.
Practical implications
The needs for fashion industry to understand the influence of increasing use of female sexuality in marketing communication on male and female consumers and the effects on their respective buying behaviours is strategic to the industry as shown in the study.
Social implications
Female sexuality in marketing communication is strategic to fashion industry in today's market among youths.
Originality/value
The millennial constitutes a larger percentage of the developing economy market with rising income thus the need to understand their buying behaviours in the fashion industry
This paper investigates how the digitized fashion market is transformed through hashtagged visual and textual brand and consumer conversations on Instagram. The study draws on assemblage and performativity theory to investigate how the American Apparel brand and its consumers develop a common visual rhetoric in opposition to mainstream fashion discourse, and uses network analysis to depict its network effects on the digitized fashion market. Drawing on multiple data sets consisting of visual, textual, and networked data, this paper finds that both brand and consumer discourse stabilize brand-related ideological fashion discourse while infiltrating prevalent mainstream fashion rhetorics. Our findings provide evidence of the visual and discursive performativity of the fashion market assemblage on Instagram and related market dynamics on a network level.
This thesis explores the importance of clothing in the lives of pre-teen girls; how do girls of 8 to 9 and 10 to 11-years-old understand both the discourses of fashion, that suggest how girls’ bodies should be dressed, as well as the material garments that they chose to put on their bodies, and make sense of these meanings on and through their bodies? What part does clothing play in their understanding of personhood and in particular the interconnection of gender, age, class, ethnicity and sexuality? What might the study of young girls and fashionable clothes tell us about the creation and negotiation of contemporary young feminine identities?
Much popular discussion in the twenty-first century, including government policy debate, has focused on the sexualisation of young girls, and the wearing of certain fashionable dress is seen as a contributory factor in this sexualizing process. Academics have begun to assess what fashion means to those who consume it, yet this literature usually assumes an adult consumer. Turning to the sociology of childhood and the recognition of childhood agency, this thesis suggests that girls’ own relationship with fashion needs to be investigated in order to consider if, and to what extent, this sexualisation is taking place, to add to our knowledge both in childhood, and fashion, sociology. This thesis examines girls as meaningful consumers of fashion and explores the relationship between clothes and identity for these girls. By carrying out focus groups, asking participants to photograph their clothes and undertaking interviews with those photographs, this research asks girls what fashion means to them. In response to concerns raised in popular debate about the ‘loss of childhood innocence’ through fashion consumption, the girls’ consumption of dress is explored in relation to the following of fashion trends, the emulating of pop stars and parental influence. This thesis refutes any simplistic mapping of these influences onto girls’ ways of dressing, demonstrating the complexities of girls’ interactions with popular ideas about what to wear and how clothes are understood. Rather, I argue that girls’ negotiations of sexuality, subject positions and fashion are complex and nuanced.
This thesis addresses key themes arising from my data that show that girls in my research are alert to social expectations and deem dress to be context-dependent. The sample demonstrated a thoughtful, thorough sense of learned social rules and taste, and individual aesthetics. Moreover, evidence from this study shows that girls are able to create multiple, fluid identities through dress, from the habitual, everyday self to the hetero-sexualised ‘girlie’ girl and back again. Clothes prove useful tools in thinking through what it means to be different types of person, but also enable girls to display kinship and friendship.
Another crucial element of fashion arising from this research is that of materiality and temporality. Dress is inextricably linked to memory and biography, acting as a memento of past events or important relationships but also enabling girls to articulate their own biographical narratives. The materiality of clothes on the body also informed them of the passing of time, acting as transitional objects. An original contribution of this thesis is a demonstration of the ways in which girls positioned themselves in the present, through previous interactions between body and garments, and the increasing tightness of those garments as the girls grew. Yet girls also tried on future identities through experiencing certain clothes on their bodies. The sensuous experience of dress allows girls to feel that they are growing up and therefore to situate themselves temporally on their life course as, this thesis argues, we may all do.
This article explores visual discourses about over-40 and over-50 femininities that emerge from women’s own Instagram accounts. It analyses women’s visual and textual rhetoric of what over-40 and over-50 looks like, and whether it could interrupt the ageist, sexist, and body-normative discourses of female ageing and visibility. Intertextual visual discourse analysis of images, captions, and hashtags reveals two dominant themes (fitness and fashion) and two repeating rhetorical elements (motherhood and self-sufficiency) through which women make themselves visible as over-40/50. A few explicitly subversive discourses (i.e., over-40 fatshion account) exist, but a discourse of a healthy, fit, fashionable, independent, self-sufficient, and happy mother over-40/50 is prevalent. It easily lends itself to being interpreted as an insidious reproduction of post-feminist ideology, but I argue that there are moments of critique and subversion within. Thus, a reparative reading that acknowledges moments of disconnect from the discourse that normalizes ageing women’s limited or non-existent visibility is offered.
This article makes the case for reception studies as a useful tool in the visual analysis of fashion photography. While there has been increased attention paid to methodology in the field of Fashion Studies of late, the study of audience reception—that is, the way viewers make sense of images—remains underdeveloped. This article lays down an experimental methodology for reception studies of fashion media, using the focus group format as sociological method and “discursive performativity” as theoretical framework. It presents a critical appraisal of this method, drawing upon the findings of research on the “woman-child” in European fashion magazines, from 1990 to 2015. In so doing, the study engages with debates on the “female gaze,” the active audience, polysemy and the “effects” of fashion magazines.
Against the backdrop of the widespread individualization of the creative workforce, various genres of social media production have emerged from the traditionally feminine domains of fashion, beauty, domesticity, and craft. Fashion blogging, in particular, is considered one of the most commercially successful and publicly visible forms of digital cultural production. To explore how fashion bloggers represent their branded personae as enterprising feminine subjects, we conducted a qualitative analysis of the textual ( n = 38 author narratives) and visual ( n = 760 Instagram images) content published by leading fashion bloggers; we supplement this with in-depth interviews with eight full-time fashion/beauty bloggers. Through this data, we show how top-ranked bloggers depict the ideal of “having it all” through three interrelated tropes: the destiny of passionate work, staging the glam life, and carefully curated social sharing. Together, these tropes articulate a form of entrepreneurial femininity that draws upon post-feminist sensibilities and the contemporary logic of self-branding. We argue, however, that this socially mediated version of self-enterprise obscures the labor, discipline, and capital necessary to emulate these standards, while deploying the unshakable myth that women should work through and for consumption. We conclude by addressing how these findings are symptomatic of a digital media economy marked by the persistence of social inequalities of gender, race, class, and more.
Visual culture has become one of the most dynamic fields of scholarship, a reflection of how the study of human culture increasingly requires distinctively visual ways of thinking and methods of analysis. Bringing together leading international scholars to assess all aspects of visual culture, the Handbook aims to provide a comprehensive and authoritative overview of the subject.
The Handbook embraces the extraordinary range of disciplines which now engage in the study of the visual - film and photography, television, fashion, visual arts, digital media, geography, philosophy, architecture, material culture, sociology, cultural studies and art history. Throughout, the Handbook is responsive to the cross-disciplinary nature of many of the key questions raised in visual culture around digitization, globalization, cyberculture, surveillance, spectacle, and the role of art.
The Handbook guides readers new to the area, as well as experienced researchers, into the topics, issues and questions that have emerged in the study of visual culture since the start of the new millennium, conveying the boldness, excitement and vitality of the subject.
This book provides a concise and much-needed introduction to the sociology of fashion. Most studies of fashion do not make a clear distinction between clothing and fashion. Kawamura argues that clothing is a tangible material product whereas fashion is a symbolic cultural product. She debunks the myth of the genius designer and explains, provocatively, that fashion is not about clothes but is a belief. There is an institutional structure, ignored by many fashion theorists, that has shaped and produced the fashion phenomenon. Kawamura further shows how the structural nature of the fashion system works to legitimize designers creativity and can make them successful. Newer fashion cities, such as Milan and New York, are the product of the fashion system that originated in Paris. Without that systemic structure, fashion culture would not exist. Fashion-ology provides a big picture approach that focuses on the social process behind fashion and its perpetuation.
Worries about the marketing of fashion to pre-teen girls and the power of fashionable clothes to sexualize these girls, have been on-going for some time. However, there is little research with this age group of girls that explicitly explores the ways in which fashionable clothes are understood and worn by the girls themselves and the impact on their sense of identity. Yet girls are increasingly considered in childhood sociology to be competent social actors able to articulate something of their own interactions and understanding of their social worlds. This study uses focus groups, participant photography and interviews with 32 predominately white, middle-class girls from the South of England, to examine pre-teen girls’ fashion practices to address this gap in knowledge. This article argues that young girls are active and thoughtful in their consumption of dress, aware of the construction of gender norms in responding to aged sexual expectations as they decide what to wear. In considering the context of their constructions of aged, gendered and (a)sexualized identity, girls code-switched between identity forms, actively constituting their subjectivity through clothing.
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/RBJHQX8R7XDP7Y9NWF38/full?target=10.1080/17569370.2022.2118974
Visual analysis of fashion images gain much attention in the fashion industry due to its commercial and social importance. In recent years, deep learning techniques offer overwhelming progress in improving the accuracy of fine‐grained apparel segmentation with accurate bounding box prediction. The baseline pixel‐based masking techniques show excellent performance in object detection and segmentation but sometimes ignores the boundary of objects, resulting in uneven and complicated segmentation masks. Moreover, it is time taking to generate a multi‐scale feature map against each anchor box. To remedy this problem, a more accurate, faster, and suitable deep learning architecture is proposed that accurately detects, classify, and performs fine‐grained segmentation of cloth products in a single platform. In this paper, initially, an Object Class Head Detector model is proposed in which the baseline Mask‐RCNN model is used as a reference model. Here, we replace the Region Proposal Network with the proposed modified YoloV2 model to locate apparel products with its class prediction. The modified YoloV2 model has more capability to detect tiny objects because of local and high‐level feature fusion. The goal of this step is to accurately locate the objects in minimum time intervals. Furthermore, the predicted bounding box is converted to object shape offsets using deep snake architecture that tightly fits onto the apparel shape. It can improve the accuracy of cloth shape segmentation by preserving object contours. The proposed architecture is empirically validated on various existing fashion image datasets. The experimental results illustrate that the proposed architecture performs better on the Deepfashion2 dataset with mAP of 86.86%, as compared to other state‐of‐the‐art deep learning models.
The subject of this article is Russo-American artist Slava Mogutin. A close associate of Gosha Rubchinskiy and Lotta Volkova, Mogutin has been based in New York since 1995. While he originally shot to fame as a poet and novelist, Mogutin is today better known as a performance artist, filmmaker and photographer. The aim of my article is to locate Mogutin, and in particular his fashion photography, within current debates around the representation of masculinity and the construction of masculine subjectivity/-ies. More specifically, using a visual analysis methodology, I analyse the camp aesthetics of Mogutin’s fashion imagery. In a number of ways, Mogutin’s camp aesthetic raises questions about displacement and identity, the clash between individual desires and social norms and – as he puts it – ‘what it means to be a young man in the modern world’. It also constitutes an avowedly political challenge, not just to the state-sponsored homophobia and heteronormativity of Mogutin’s native Russia but also to the identity politics underpinning today’s fashion industry. I conclude by suggesting that Mogutin’s openly political form of camp might pose a challenge to the traditional Sontagian view of camp as apolitical.
Fashion imagery has existed for hundreds of years and yet the methods used by scholars to understand it have remained mostly historical and descriptive. The belief informing these approaches may be that fashion imagery is designed for one purpose: to depict a garment and how to wear it. In this interdisciplinary book, Sanda Miller suggests a radical alternative to these well-practiced approaches, proposing that fashion imagery has stories to tell and meanings to uncover. The methodology she has developed is an iconography of fashion imagery, based on the same theory which has been key to the History of Art for centuries.
Applying Panofsky’s theory of iconography to illustrations from books, magazines and fashion plates, as well as to fashion photography and even live fashion events, Miller uncovers three levels of meaning: descriptive, secondary (or conventional) and tertiary or ‘symbolic’. In doing so, she answers questions such as: who is the model; what did people wear and why; and how did people live? She proves that fashion imagery, far from being purely descriptive, is ripe with meaning and can be used to shed light on society, class, culture and the history of dress.
This study analyzes and interprets the depicted older characters in the featured photographs in Chinese fashion magazines, namely, Harper’s Bazaar China and FHM China, to extend the research context and enrich the literature on the mediated images of older people. The concept of assemblage and the tetravalent model of assemblages developed by Deleuze and Guattari are adopted as the major theoretical framework and methodology. The study reveals that the fashion pictures as assemblages are territorialised by the coinciding binary lines of young/old and fashionable/unfashionable. The assemblages of older bodies depicted in the pictures are fixed by the attributes of rural origin, lower class, and fashion insensitivity and the discourses of ‘the elderly in empty nests’ and ‘the Chinese Dama.’ The older bodies act to destabilise the fashion pictures due to their heterogeneity with fashion. They reterritorialize the young female models as intruders to their ghetto territories. However, the models, who are empowered by their majoritarian roles, the otherness machine, and the fashion Orientalism, finally legitimate their intrusion and reterritorialize the older bodies as ‘bodies without layers.’ The elderly men’s conventional power as an active gazer is deterritorialised by the young female models.
The study of fashion has expanded into a thriving field of inquiry, with researchers utilizing diverse methods from across subject disciplines to explore fashion and dress in wide–ranging contexts. With an emphasis on material culture and ethnographic approaches in fashion studies, this groundbreaking volume offers fascinating insights into the complex dynamics of research and fashion.
Featuring unique case studies, with interdisciplinary scholars reflecting on their practical research experiences, Fashion Studies provides rich and nuanced perspectives on the use, and mixing and matching of methodological approaches — including object and image based research, the integration of qualitative and quantitative methods and the fluid bridging of theory and practice. Engaging with diverse subjects, from ethnographies of model casting and street–style blogging, wardrobe studies and a material culture analysis of global denim wearing, to Martin Margiela's design and archival methods, Fashion Studies presents complex approaches in a lively and informative manner that will appeal to students of fashion, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies and related fields.
Visual culture has become one of the most dynamic fields of scholarship, a reflection of how the study of human culture increasingly requires distinctively visual ways of thinking and methods of analysis. Bringing together leading international scholars to assess all aspects of visual culture, the Handbook aims to provide a comprehensive and authoritative overview of the subject.
The Handbook embraces the extraordinary range of disciplines which now engage in the study of the visual - film and photography, television, fashion, visual arts, digital media, geography, philosophy, architecture, material culture, sociology, cultural studies and art history. Throughout, the Handbook is responsive to the cross-disciplinary nature of many of the key questions raised in visual culture around digitization, globalization, cyberculture, surveillance, spectacle, and the role of art.
The Handbook guides readers new to the area, as well as experienced researchers, into the topics, issues and questions that have emerged in the study of visual culture since the start of the new millennium, conveying the boldness, excitement and vitality of the subject.
The Dress Detective is the first practical guide to analysing fashion objects, clearly demonstrating how their close analysis can enhance and enrich interdisciplinary research. This accessible book provides readers with the tools to uncover the hidden stories in garments, setting out a carefully developed research methodology specific to dress, and providing easy to use checklists that guide the reader through the process.
Beautifully illustrated, the book contains seven case studies of fashionable Western garments - ranging from an 1820s coat to a 2004 Kenzo jacket - that articulate the methodological framework for the process, illustrate the use of the checklists, and show how evidence from the garment itself can be used to corroborate theories of dress or fashion.
This book outlines a skillset that has, until now, typically been passed on informally. Written in plain language, this book will give any budding fashion historian, curator or researcher the knowledge and confidence to analyse the material in front of them effectively.
Dress and fashion are central to our understanding of art. From the stylization of the body to subtle textile embellishments and richly symbolic colors, dress tells a story and provides clues as to the cultural beliefs of the time in which artworks were produced. This concise and accessible book provides a step-by-step guide to analysing dress in art, including paintings, photographs, drawings and art installations..
The first section of the book includes an introduction to visual analysis and explains how to 'read' fashion and dress in an artwork using the checklists. The second section offers case studies which demonstrate how artworks can be analysed from the point of view of key themes including status and identity, modernity, ideals of beauty, gender, race, globalization and politics. The book includes iconic as well as lesser known works of art, including work by Elisabeth Vigée le Brun, Thomas Gainsborough, James Jacques Tissot, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, Yinka Shonibare, Mickalene Thomas, Kent Monkman and many others..
Reading Fashion in Art is the perfect text for students of fashion coming to art history for the first time as well as art history students studying dress in art and will be an essential handbook for any gallery visitor. The step-by-step methodology helps the reader learn to look at any work of art that includes the dressed or undressed body and confidently develop a critical analysis of what they see.
Purpose
Fashion advertising as a contemporary ideological form has the power to deliver semiotic messages, which frames individuals' perception. Promoting perfection in consumer culture has resulted in the creation of unrealistic self-image and negative effects that led to psychological illnesses and pathological behaviours. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the ideology behind the contemporary fashion advertising that embraces imperfection and is linked to consumer subjective well-being.
Design/methodology/approach
Nine fashion ads were selected based on the WGSN consumer report Embracing Imperfection . A sample of images was analysed applying semiotic analysis combined with the criteria of content analysis.
Findings
The results supported the notion that some contemporary fashion communication brands are challenging the conventional idea of perfection. Five themes were identified as the characteristics that bridged the visual surface of advertising with its hidden ideologies of imperfection. By supporting “anonymity”, fashion brand communication is against excessive self-focus and helps reducing anxiety due to being imperfect. By promoting “rawness”, it encourages authenticity and uniqueness. “Banality” rejects materialism and promotes the beauty of the boring day. “Ugliness” advocates for removal of the single standards and celebrate individual differences, and “spontaneity” is interchangeable for humanity, freedom, openness and acceptance of self.
Originality/value
This study is among the few attempts to conduct semiotic analysis of fashion advertising images aiming to identify the visual components and ideologies that could potentially be linked to subjective well-being in fashion communication.
Purpose
This paper demonstrates how #50+ fashion Instagram influencers contribute to the social construction of cognitive age through their aesthetic digital labours.
Design/methodology/approach
Non-participative netnography was used in the form of visual and textual analysis of over 300 Instagram posts including images, captions and comments.
Findings
Findings reveal how outfit selection, background choices and bodily poses redefine expressions of look age through forms of aesthetic labour. Post-construction, hashtag and emoji usage illustrates how influencers refrain from directly posting about the fashion brands that they endorse. Instead, image and personality work visually attracts followers to politically charged posts which directly impact upon the social and cultural contexts where influencers are active. This ties into present-day wider societal discourses.
Practical implications
50+ fashion influencers have high spending power. Fashion brands should refrain from using #brand and collaborate in more subtle ways and concentrate on challenging the negativity of the old-age cliché.
Originality/value
The study advances theory on the social construction of age in fashion studies by combining cognitive age with aesthetic labour to identify the characteristics of the social phenomenon of the 50+ Instagram influencer. It applies principles from critical visual analysis to digital context, thereby advancing the qualitative netnographic toolkit.
This study examines the advertising campaign of a beauty product SK-II, “Change Destiny” through the lens of critical discourse analysis. By unpacking the verbal language and visuals in the three advertisements and a video advertisement, this article aims to investigate how the beauty advertiser SK-II constructs the ideal images of women through discursive strategies in ads and uncover the possible ideologies underlying the advertising discourse. Adopting Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (1990 ,1996) framework of ‘reading images’ and systemic functional grammar (Butt, 2012; Halliday, 1994) to analyze the texts and visuals in the ads, this study has found that the beauty brand SK-II has utilized various strategies to engage the audiences and market its products, such as problematizing the aging of women, providing personalized solutions to the problem of aging, constructing certain feminist discourses for women, and drawing itself close to the younger generation through women empowerment. The findings show that although the beauty brand claims to empower women through advocating change of destiny for women in its ads, gender ideology remains to be dominant and continues to perpetrate women. It is concluded that these new changes in the ads are simply playful discursive strategies that employed by advertisers to legitimate the new capitalism and commercialism and generate more sales.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine the strategic importance of visual aesthetics and presentation modality for consumer responses to fashion luxury brand content posted on Instagram.
Design/methodology/approach
A content analysis of 40,679 posts on the official Instagram accounts of 15 global luxury brands was conducted.
Findings
Brand posts using expressive aesthetic image received more likes and comments on Instagram than those with classical aesthetics. Brand video content received more likes and comments than static content. There was also a significant interaction between visual aesthetics and presentation modality in generating likes and comments. Brand content adopting expressive aesthetic and audio-visual modality generated more responses when using audio-visual modality, while content using classical aesthetics produced more responses in a visual-only format.
Practical implications
As visual aesthetics and modality resulted in different responses to Instagram ads, luxury marketers should consider using appropriate approaches when creating brand posts on Instagram.
Originality/value
This is one of the few studies examining the effectiveness of visual aesthetics and presentation modality in Instagram advertising, especially in luxury fashion brand context.
This article examines fashion imagery in regard to representations of power as they pertain to the mise en scene of fashion advertising. By employing a specific form of image critique employed by Michel Foucault in The Order of Things (1966), a new methodology for analyzing fashion advertising is proposed and formulated. This form of critique enables elements such as the gaze, light and space to be framed into lines of sight. These lines can be examined in regard to the viewing subject, the staging of the advert, and structures of power. In his critique of the painting by Diego Velázquez Las Meninas (1656 Velazquez, D. 1656. Las Meninas. Madrid: Prado Museum. [Google Scholar]), Foucault states: “No gaze is stable, or rather, in the neutral furrow of the gaze piercing at a right angle through the canvas, subject and object, the spectator and the model, reverse their roles to infinity” (2005, 5). These themes enable us to use this methodology to critique fashion imagery and this article offers up a new approach to visual analysis, one that has not been considered before and that can now be added to the fashion theory toolbox.
The purpose of this study was to develop a more accurate method for analyzing fashion image digital colors in uncertain observation conditions. The standard color values used in this experiment were obtained from 10 pieces of actual clothing provided by their designers. The comparison color values were created from fashion images using human visual perception, software color analysis, and a combination of human visual perception and software color analysis. The other 10 color values were determined using the method developed in this study. The data were processed using Microsoft Excel 2013 and the statistical program R 3.4.2. Descriptive analyses, 1‐way anova tests, and a multiple comparisons post‐test were conducted using false discovery rates. The results showed that a combination of human and software analysis produced more accurate results than either alone. ΔE*ab 3–6 was found to be the minimum color difference tolerance between actual clothing and fashion image.
The rapid growth of the Chinese economy since the late 1970s has dramatically changed the dynamics of the marketplace. China’s consumer society has been transformed to a more liberal market system in which a variety of diverse market imageries have been created and circulated to consumers. This article examines how global fashion brands construct different ‘modern girl’ archetypes for consumers in the emerging Chinese market. Through conducting a semiotic analysis of printed advertisements published in four major fashion magazines during a four-year period from the beginning of 2009 to the end of 2012, we identified six ‘modern girl’ archetypes constructed by global fashion brands. Our findings reveal a dialogical relationship between brand-created imageries and prevailing cultural attitudes. We argue that fashion brands strategically create alternative modern girl archetypes as a way to depict a new era marked by the liberation of Chinese women under the influence of global consumer culture.
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to explore how interior spaces can be differently represented across home magazines of different background and target audiences. And investigates how visual texts can differentiate a brand, increase brand loyalty and target different market segments.
Design/methodology/approach
– This paper draws on material for comparative analysis from three home magazines (Wallpaper, Ideal Home and Elle Decoration). It combines quantitative methods (content analysis) and qualitative methods (fieldwork observations).
Findings
– This research suggests that Wallpaper is not just a magazine, but it has expanded to become a brand with a well-recognized logo. Practitioners managed to create a strong brand through the creation of a magazine with a very distinctive style among its competitors that clearly address the elite.
Research limitations/implications
– This paper focused on the production of magazine features and representations of interior spaces. Further research could be conducted to explore how readers belonging to different economic, social and cultural groups “receive” and comprehend the home magazine features.
Practical implications
– The findings of this research could be used to analyse fashion photography in editorial, fashion advertising, fashion brand websites and social media, thereby assisting in the analysis of fashion photography and the relationship between fashion items, set design, styling of space, target audiences, branding and visual communication; exploring further how fashion photography can effectively target different market segments and enhance a fashion brand and its identity.
Originality/value
– The area of magazine features, photography, set design and styling of space has received limited attention from scholars. The method of analysing interior spaces/set design presented in this paper can be developed further to provide in depth analysis of window and in store display design and the use of display design and visual merchandising as a way to reflect the fashion brand identity, target-specific market segments, differentiate and gain competitive advantage.
The primary argument of this paper arises from the need identified in fashion design education within a South African context for a shift in the focus of theoretical curricula content to convert from a diploma to a degree structure. This paper addresses this concern and reports on the baseline assessment of a devised and implemented tool to advance visual literacy thinking skills of undergraduate fashion design students, applied to the selection of images for mood boards. The inquiry adopted an action research design and obtained data from systematically documented reflective notes, completed student image analysis help sheets and a comparison of assessment results of mood boards created before and after the application of the tool. While assessment results indicate an improvement in the level of thinking skills of some students, surface learning was identified as an underlying challenge to address for refinement of the tool. Improved results, nevertheless, suggest that the strategic principles facilitated through the tool and the subsequent recommendations for refinement present a potential framework to underpin the visual conceptual design challenges of students for consideration in a degree structure.
The article discusses the challenges in creating a multi-methodological approach to doctoral theses that take the study of fashion as their subject. Using my doctoral thesis on the Bakhtinian grotesque in fashion at the turn of the twenty-first century as a case study, the article
highlights the need for the inclusion of theories and methods from a wide variety of disciplines and fields of studies. It also sets up a comparison between fashion studies and other emerging or newly emerged disciplines and fields of studies, chiefly film and performance studies. It suggests
a parallel between the relation of fashion studies to costume studies and the relation of performance studies to theater studies. Finally, the article opens up the question of whether it is desirable for fashion studies to become a self-standing discipline and/or remain an interdisciplinary
field, as it is described within the introductory pages of this journal.
The purpose of this analysis was to synthesize diverse theoretical positions advanced within contemporary feminist literature on the dressed female body and to consider the varied ways in which these theoretical positions may have bearing on the field of textiles and clothing. Feminist perspectives of the dressed body are discussed as related to (a) modern feminist readings of the body, (b) postmodern feminist readings of the body, (c) feminist musings about the possibility of the body as a vehicle for empowerment, and (d) feminist perspectives on ambivalence and the body. Throughout the discussion, feminist theories of the dressed body are compared and situated with respect to broader feminist ideologies and assumptions. Concluding this work, suggestions are provided for future applications of feminist theory of the dressed body to textiles and clothing scholarship.
The Face of Fashion: Cultural Studies in Fashion
- J Craik
Fashion Photography and Gender
- M Laing
Adorned in Dreams: Fashion & Modernity. I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd. (First published 1985 by Virago)
- E Wilson