The Fashion Magazine And The Middle-Class Feminine Identity

This is a dissertation about the feminist media studies, which focuses on the interactive relationship among female, society and media. On the basis of the theory of social gender and A.Giddens' Self-identity theory, the article adopts qualitative methods of Humanism approach, assisted with quality analysis, making use of the fashion magazine "ELLE" as a special case, in order to demonstrate the impression about the Chinese fashion female journals imposed on the middle-class women after 1990.At the latter part of the 18 century, the female fashion magazine originated from Europe. After the bourgeoisie showed up in the history, there came out a series of practical activities about cultural accommodations, one of which is spitting the domain of public and private sphere, excluding the bourgeoisie's women out of social working field and made them focus on domestic sphere activities such as social communication, comity and housekeeping. Female fashion magazine satisfied these kinds of social needs, becoming schoolbooks which cultivate female, being male's attachment and decoration, some female gender's techniques, for example, female image, feminity.After 1960's, under the cooperation between female fashion magazine and consumism, given the consciousness of female gender, the main aim of these magazines is to bring up the capitalism consumers. In 1949, Chinese women gained the equal political, economical and educational rights as men which are guaranteed by the Law. But this kind of equality's cost is sacrificing female's special value and gender difference, which make Chinese women overweighed.After China reformation and opening-up to the whole world, Chinese women could not identified with their former image. In 1990's with the second wave of reformation and opening-up, there showed up some new middle-class at the metropolises along the eastern coast. They need some cultural symbols to express themselves and their class, to separate them from other social class and show their own social position. Under the push of country saying "modernization" , foreign female magazines rush into China, for China being a huge undeveloped market. "ELLE" boosts itself as a textbook to middle class female but in fact it still provides certain gender words about sexy and beauty, that is, consumption speeds up self-realization. The advertisements and words full of the air of consumption which not only attract a lot of middle class office ladies but also allure some under middle class young ladies. To the former, they wish to identify their class position, to the latter, they hope to imitate them to break away their own class. Although female fashion magazine afford a special communication room for women, but most of them can never deviate the rule of commodity and consumption. For this reason, it has no relationship with female liberation.It is not a casual phenomenon for the female fashion magazine to be popular. As one of the public cultural industry, it must be enslaved to the political and economical principles of capitalism. The purpose of mass media is to gain the maximum profits, which makes them to search the common sense in the toolbox of culture.At last, the article believes the mass media should become the active pusher to the society development before female and it also do some discussion on the probability of feminist cultural objective model referred by G.Simmel.