Aesthetic-Culture Unscrambling Of Women's Fashion Magazine

Since 1980s, there has appeared a remarkable aesthetic phenomenon of culture in Chinese society—the emergence of women's fashion magazine. As a kind of special type of the fashion texts, those fashion magazines have an extensive influence on their readers' (mainly career women) life style and values through spreading popular information related to dressing, weight-loss, cosmetology, gastronomy, tourism, human relationship, etc. Thus, this phenomenon attracted attention of scholars in various fields. However, in China, scholars mainly study fashion magazines in terms of Journalism, communications, publishing and design art, never has someone discussed the nature of women's fashion magazine in aesthetic terms. Superficially, these magazines are broadcasting the fashion life style and cultural ideal to readers; but in fact, they are spreading the content of consumption, which is a special type of aesthetic-culture spreading. Therefore, it is necessary to study women's fashion magazine in the context of aesthetic culture. Through this way, we can have a better understanding of fashion magazines' aesthetic nature and how their cultural functions fulfill.This dissertation can be divided into five sections:Section I Introduction: It illustrates the contemporary research condition on women's fashion magazine in China, gives a brief introduction of its main contents, and indicates various research manners used in this dissertation.Section II Analysis on the relationship between fashion and women's fashion magazine: In terms of philosophy, this relationship is equal to that of economic base and superstructure. In Chapter 1, on the basis of indicating fashion's connotation and denotation, giving a clear definition of women's fashion magazine and its classification, and briefly showing its development at home and abroad, it discusses the dual relationship between fashion and women's fashion magazine, pointing out that it is the international fashion industry that provides the economic foundation for fashion magazine, conversely, fashion magazine spreads fashion views and has certain impact (promotion or restriction) on fashion industry. Section III Aesthetic and cultural analysis on women's fashion magazine: By spreading content relevant to daily life and selecting impressive pictures, characters, colors and page layouts to attract readers, women's fashion magazine has inherently shown its nature of aesthetic ideology. Thus, through analyzing fashion magazine's ideology nature and its aesthetic features reflected in content and forms, Chapter 2 provides a vivid explanation of how fashion magazine guides readers into consumer culture. What's more, in order to give a relatively objective evaluation on women's fashion magazine, part C of this chapter criticizes certain mistaken views on fashion magazine and confirms its aesthetic value.Section IV Aesthetic analysis on readers' reception of women's fashion magazine: In part A of Chapter 3, it discusses three important factors that affect readers' reception psychology. Then part B indicates the process of readers' reception consists of three stages: in the stage of "aesthetic perception", readers can have a board view of those female images in fashion magazine; in the stage of "aesthetic experience", topics in fashion magazine will arouse readers' emotional resonance; and only minority of readers can attain to the stage of "aesthetic transcendence", realizing the consumptive nature of women's fashion magazine.Section V Conclusion...