Analysis Of Consumer Culture In Modern Society Through Fashion Magazines

With the changes of social structure and the competition of media, fashion magazines emerged and have developed under the background of economic globalization. Fashion magazines are the product of the development of social economy and culture, and at the same time, they reflect the consumer culture of modern society. Modern society is consumption society and the consumer culture is one of its most important features. Nowadays consumption of is not only material consumption but the consumption of symbol value, visual effect, enjoyment purpose and idol adoration. Every kind of consumer culture has its own reasons and features during its emergence and development, which produce positive or negative effects. Mass media, especially fashion magazines reflect and accelerate the expansion of consumer culture by disseminate information of consumption and life styles.This thesis can be divided into three major parts.The first part introduces some information about fashion magazines, including the status quo of fashion magazines, the reasons of emergence and the problems of recent years, making a brief introduction of their prosperous development and providing some background material for the research.The second part is mainly about the consumer culture. This part represents how consumer culture comes into being and extends at first. Then it describes several kinds of consumer culture of nowadays, such as vision consumption, symbol consumption, enjoyment consumption and idol consumption. Meanwhile this part analyzes the reasons of emergence, the status quo and the effects of every kind of consumer culture.The third part takes《Fashion·Cosmopolitan》as example, focusing on the positioning, the contents, the formats and the advertisements of fashion magazines. This part tries to find the overlap between fashion magazines and consumer culture, such as vision consumption, symbol consumption, enjoyment consumption and idol consumption through analyzing fashion magazines.The last part deals with the relationship between fashion magazines and consumer culture. Fashion magazines lead and publicize consumption culture while consumer culture provides exterior circumstance and economic support for fashion magazines. They both develop during cooperating and coexisting with each other.