Soundtrack: Shahrooz: Raoofi Watching Stars
“Fashion is never anything but an amnesiac substitution of the present for the past” – Roland Barthes
Perhaps nowhere except in the semiotics of fashion advertising is the use of transportation, narrative, dreamworld, and experience design more sophisticated in its hegemonic beauty.
Further, fashion advertising is an excellent example of identity-image producing media where signifier and signified collapse. The nature of the fashion object is tied directly to our manufacture of identity – those objects which we encase and adorn our bodies for public consumption – and fashion is acknowledged as a co-created cultural language of “style”. In the realm of Haute Couture fashion advertising, those products and identity-image advertisements at the top of the social-economic spectrum: brands such as Dolce Gabbana, Gucci, Alexander McQueen, Prada, etc, media such as runway shows, Vogue, Allure – the goal of producing an attractive identity product is pursued with an affluence of money and artistic talents drawn internationally to create the most emotive and entrancing hyperreal simulacra within those media channels.
I found these articles to be exceptionally well researched in articulating a stance on the cultural implications of fashions’ highly developed grammar of sign systems within advertising and how that relates to identity manufacture. I hope you find them equally fascinating.
“Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.” – Oscar Wilde
Speaking of Fashion: Consumers’ Uses of Fashion Discourses and the Appropriation of Countervailing Cultural Meanings
This article explores the ways that consumers use fashion discourse to inscribe their consumption behaviors in a complex ideological system of folk theories about the nature of self as it relates to and exists within the context of society. Verbatim texts of 20 interviews concerning consumers’ perceptions and experiences of fashion are interpreted through a hermeneutic (interpretive) process with specific consideration given to gender and identity issues. Whereas critics of consumer culture frequently argue that fashion discourses enshroud consumer perceptions in a common hegemonic outlook, the authors analysis suggests that this ideological system offers a myriad of countervailing interpretive standpoints that consumers combine, adapt, and juxtapose to fit the conditions of their everyday lives. Read Article.
Narrative and Persuasion in Fashion Advertising
Narrative transportation—to be carried away by a story—has been proposed as a distinct route to persuasion. But as originally conceived, narrative transportation is unlikely to occur in response to advertisements, where persuasive intent is obvious and consumer resistance is expected. The authors of this article analyze fashion ads to show how narrative transportation can nonetheless be a possible response to ads, if specific aesthetic properties are present, most notably when grotesque imagery is used. The authors then situate narrative transportation as one of five modes of engaging fashion advertising, each of which serves as a distinct route to persuasion. They explain how aesthetic properties of ads call forth different modes of engagement and explore how grotesque imagery can lead to either narrative transportation or immersion. As routes to persuasion, transportation and immersion work by intensifying brand experience rather than boosting brand evaluation. Read Article.
Fashion Photography as Semiotics: Barthes and the Limites of Classification
Semiotics, the system of signs asserting meaning by way of language and image, proves to be enormously relevant and valuable when looking at fashion photography as a means of communication. The author argues that fashion photography speaks both to the reality and illusion of garments and of bodies, and in deconstructing how these elements are organized and presented, a new language and system emerges from the photographic work. The author explores how Roland Barthes places fashion photography within a semiological framework, applying semiotic structure and rationale to the genre as a system of communication for symbols and signs present within any given image. Read Article.
The Counterfeit Body: Fashion Photography and the Deceptions of Femininity, Sexuality, Authenticity, and Self in the 1950s, 60s and 70s
Fashion, as it is actualized and spoken through the medium of photography, represents some of the most beautiful and hideous elements of culture and society. Invariably, fashion photography pictures and proffers standards of beauty, self and display that, by sheer style and omnipresence, overwhelm common sense and rational thought. The innate contradictions within fashion photography and the larger industry it represents burden the form with criticism. This precarious position fashion photography exists in endangers the possibility of looking at the form outside a purely non-decorative or aesthetic framework, and further, problematizes the reconciliation of a place for its valid study in the academic schema. Read Article.