A Study On The Female Images In Fashion Magazines In The Context Of Consumerism

Along with the process of industrialization and urbanization, the advanced scienceand technology, and large scale of quantitative production, the human society developeda new way of life and cultural ideology that different from any previous era. It is not theuse value of goods as consumption purpose, but the pursuit of goods’ symbol value, likeconspicuous, luxury and fashionable, as life’s value. It’s called consumerism culture. InChina, mass media on one hand is the most dynamic and expansive cultural industry, onthe other hand is the most effective communicator and promoter for consumerism culture,it can mix consumer’s culture value and behavior together, through unified operation ofcommunication means and consumption system. The representative media is femalefashion magazine. The economic development brings abundant material, the fast pace ofmodern life, people’s increasing demand for information and rising consumption desire.Fashion magazine complies with their requirements, uses beautiful pictures and wordsthat away from daily life to make readers enjoying reading’s spiritual and visual pleasureand communicate “none-depth, fragmentized and repeatable” consumerism culture. Inthis process, fashion magazine accomplishes its mission as a producer of spiritual culture,and achieve its profit purpose as a member of information industry.The paper selects female image of VOGUE Fashion&Beauty as the research’sobject, because it has become a symbolic image with symbolism in contemporary visualculture, it’s not only treated as materialized image, but also a example of female aestheticcognition and consuming behavior that bearing complicated cultural connotation.Meanwhile, female image conforms to fashion magazine’s brand positioning, contentstyle and target readers’ needs, setting up a perfect model for them. As a comprehensivelifestyle magazine, VOGUE Fashion&Beauty completely abandons workplace andgender topics, provides information of fashion, makeup, beauty, health, entertainmentand art for young and fashionable women. The author selects the magazine’s cover fromthe first issue in September2005to February issue in2014and twelve issues of2012assample, counts up the cover-girls, advertisement’s content and space, columns andinterview’s title and content to analyzes the female images and discusses the magazine’sbuilding “pseudo-environment” by “agenda-setting” and power to discipline female bodywith consumerism culture, summarizes its “fashion logic” that leading readers toshopping, buying and communicating consumerism culture in the progress.