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Advertising and Fashion

C. Guertin UOIT | EDUC5199G

07 July 2015

Empowerment through agency

Bloom’s Taxonomy

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Wong and Henriksen want us to think of fashion as a verb: as an act of personal expression and

creative production

Virginia Funes wants us, as teachers, to create critical viewers who can recognize themselves as an intended audience that advertisers attempt to manipulate

Ads are extremely complex machines for delivering ideological messages, forms of social control, mythologies, normative behaviour, and hegemonic discourse

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Meaning of an image is produced in three ways: 1. Viewers interpret or are affected by the image 2. By the context in which an image is seen 3. By the intended aims or outcome of the producer

of the image

Viewers make meaning • Images’ meanings are contextual and situated. • They are created in part when, where, and by whom they are consumed, and not only when, where, and by whom they are produced.

• For example, when M*A*S*H* aired in the 1970s, even though the plot was set in Korea of the 50’s, it resonated as a veiled critique of the Vietnam War and America’s involvement.

Race, gender and other political contexts are embedded in visual images

Teen Filmmaker Recreates Famous Race Experiment From '40s

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjy9q8VekmE

Media images in

our culture can make

ugly things seem hip or

sexy

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What do ads sell?

Funes advocates for ads to function as a pedagogical discourse. How so?

Advertising is a top-down authoritarian discourse. Paulo Freire describes it as “the radical opposite of

dialogue and authentic communication among people” (Funes 164).

Advertising has four antidialogue traits:

1.  Conquest 2.  Division

3.  Manipulation 4.  Cultural invasion

Examples?

Advertising as a pedagogical discourse incorporates three types of practices: semiotic, ideological and economic.

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Advertising fosters want. Education seeks to foster logic. Who wins?

What do we analyze in an ad?

What is there to analyze in an Ad?

•  Design (balance, asymmetry) •  Relationship between image and text •  White space •  Photographic angles (significance, high angle/look down

on, low angle/look up to, or equal to subjects) •  Genre •  Lighting, shadows (mood) •  Colors (which and significance of)

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Example: An Ad with a Man, Woman and Text

•  Facial expressions, hair color and style, fashion, props, gender, age, race, signs of occupation, relationship between figures

•  What is the ‘action’? What is the narrative or moment within a broader narrative?

•  How are camera angles used? What do they tell us about power relations?

•  Signs, symbols, basic themes, context •  How is language used? (arguments, associations,

analogies, typeface) •  Product or service •  Values and beliefs (patriotism, motherly love,

success, power, taste)

Advertising presents images of fantasy (idealized lifestyles, sex appeal, happiness, power, elegance) and of what ‘should be’

Analyzing the Fidji Ad by Christie Barakat

•  Semiotic Analysis: how do sign, symbols and codes generate meaning?

•  Psychoanalytic Theory: appeals to unconscious elements (psyche, anxiety, sexuality, id/ego/superego)

•  Sociological Analysis: class, gender, race, status and role (how does product reflect about social concerns)

•  Historical Analysis: part of campaign? Relates to historical events? (political?) Colonialism?

•  Myth/Ritual Analysis: does ad relate to ancient myths? •  Critical Theory/Feminist: How is the woman

represented? How does the gaze function? What are the implications of encoded power dynamics?

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Semiotic Interpretation (Ferdinand de Saussure)

•  Saussure’s signs are made of signifiers (sounds or images) and signifieds (concepts or ideas)

•  Expressions, body language, clothes, voices--nearly everything we do—function as signifiers of something (moods, feelings, beliefs, religion etc)

•  Relationship between signifiers and signified is arbitrary (based on convention and must be learned, not natural or universal)

Semiotic Interpretation: C.S. Pierce

•  Signs that signify by resemblance, or icons (photographic conventions, rhetoric)

•  Signs that signify by cause and effect, or indexes (smoke rising)

•  Signs that signify by conventions, or symbols (flag, star of David)

Psychoanalytic Analysis •  Snakes are phallic symbols in Freudian psychology

(snake is wound around woman’s neck), an iconic representation

•  Snakes and women are part of the Adam & Eve story, mythological significance (snake tempted Eve and she convinced Adam to eat from the Tree of Knowledge)

•  Anxiety related to snakes •  Perfume can be seen as venom with magical

qualities (makes women irresistible to men)

Psychoanalytic Analysis •  The snake forms an “S”, the thin black cording on

bottle forms an “E,” and the woman’s fingers form an “X”; thus the word sex is hidden in the ad (this theory would hold that subliminally we would be affected by this and feel more inclined toward sexual activity)

•  The orchid is a sexual symbol, flowers being the sexual apparatus of plants; we use flowers to make exciting scents

•  Freud’s structural hypothesis of the psyche (being in the tropics and away from civilization, which works to curtail the id impulses).

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Sociological Analysis of Fidji Ad

•  Based on the woman in the ad, we can conclude the target audience is both men and women, but especially men who are looking for an exotic experience and a submissive (if slightly dangerous) woman to escape with in fantasy

•  Escaping involves nature and romantic love; Polynesian woman is allegedly more passionate, less inhibited than white women

•  Buying Fidji means being an elite, in terms of lifestyle or taste culture (wearing a refined perfume may define one’s socio-economic class)

•  Fidji attracts a sexual partner and consolidates the belief that the wearer is sophisticated and desirable, confers status through luxury item

Marxist Analysis of Fidji Ad •  This ad reflects graphically the exploitation of people in

the Third World by people in the First World, and by bourgeois capitalist societies that encourage capitalist corporations like Guy Laroche, maker of Fidji perfume

•  According to Marxism, capitalism has survived by exporting its problems, thus the ad if for capitalist imperialism, not perfume

•  The ad is an example of bourgeois consumer culture excesses, including sexuality, which can be used against us to make wasteful purchases in the name of glamour

Marxist Analysis of Fidji Ad

•  Industry has political mission to distract us from civic culture to focus on private expenditures

•  We revel in our personal luxuries and take refuge in gated communities, built on the backs of less powerful people, while society spirals into chaos

•  We attempt to assuage our alienation by creating consumer cultures, which creates greater profits for those who own the channels of production and distribution

•  Marxist approach, however, is doctrinaire, and has imploded as Soviet societies are now feverishly consuming, lacks resonance even if correct

The Myth Model and the Fidji Ad

•  The Myth (Eve or Medusa?)

•  An historical event related to the myth

•  A text or work from elite culture based on the myth

•  A text or work for popular culture based on the myth

•  Some aspects of everyday life based on the myth

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Feminist Interpretation of the Fidji Ad

•  We live in a phallocentric society dominated by males •  Males are blind to their power and the role of the

phallus in society, assuming that power structures are natural and logical

•  The Fidji ad is a perfect representation: a woman with a snake (phallic symbol) draped around her neck. The woman is accessible to the male gaze (a look by men that reduces women to sexual objects).

•  She is holding the perfume that will make her irresistible thus participating in her own subjugation.

•  A return to paradise, for women, is powerlessness and male domination.

The Male Gaze: How Women Are Presented in Beer Ads: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zZxWQ97RFA

In order to overcome ‘resistance’ in the viewer, advertising takes on many voices and modes of address thereby interpellating us as ideological

subjects What audience is the advertiser targeting?

Funny? Nike ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GX-QhoihLeI&feature=player_embedded

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Understanding is related to

knowing and knowing is

related to power

Who is in charge here? What is the story?

Why is this an acceptable way to sell a product?

Laura Mulvey, a film theorist, revealed the secret power behind

our cultural images when in the 1970s

she defined the controlling gaze in Western culture as

‘male’ and ‘white’

• The gaze is not literal • It is a way of

discussing the abstract relations of power

maintained by practices of looking • Just as there are

different types of power, there are

different types of gazes

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Who is looking? Who is in charge here?

Jeremy Bentham and the Panopticon (1791)

"   It was to be an architecture of control "   Central tower "   Individual cells "   Directional blinds

"   It was the greatest Prison never built

"   Pan + optic = all seeing "   With the advent of the Age

of Reason came the desire to impose order rather than torture or execution

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"   Not a literal prison, but the power of self-surveillance manifest in contemporary society "   Enacted in schools, hospitals, and the army "   A mechanism of social control—discipline over the body "   The inspecting Gaze is internalized as self-imposed discipline

Foucault’s Panopticon

Docile Subject

A captive Saddam Hussein controlled and contained by the medical gaze

In visual culture studies, French theorist Michel Foucault’s ideas about how panoptic mechanisms continue to be enacted through the

gaze in contemporary culture are very influential.

"   The Tower: Seeing is power "   prisoners are seen, but cannot see

"   forced to behave "   cannot see others "   guards are seen by supervisors

•  If you can’t hide from the Gaze, how can you overcome it?

•  Its all-seeing eye produces docility and conformity

Appellation is the name for the different modes of address that ads use to attract and seduce us

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AT&T, ‘You Will’ commercials

• A series of AT & T ads ran in 1993 that proclaimed to the viewer

“YOU WILL”

• This is not an invitation or a question, but an order: “You will do

this whether you like it or not” • It shows us in its very form of

address that it is an ideological statement that seeks to enlist us

as subjects for its futuristic technological product line.

• It makes their will your will. • The ad beckons us each to

assume the subject position of the user of the technology.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZb0avfQme8

Interpellation • Interpellation is the process whereby ideology calls out to me and “hails” me as a social subject through language and images, telling me my place in the social and political system.

• Ideology says to me in effect: HEY YOU! And I say WHO ME? Are you addressing me? And ideology says, YES, I mean YOU! • Barbara Kruger parodies this mode of address • Interpellation reveals how ideologies enlist or recruit us into a particular belief system.

Barbara Kruger, How Dare You Not Be Me? (1996)

Barbara Kruger’s work as an artist has long ago been co-opted by the advertising world, but continues to make

viewers think about issues of our consumerist society.

http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/kruger/clip1.html

Louis Althusser and Interpellation • We use the term “subject” in cultural studies instead of the term individual to articulate that we are social actors who are “spoken for” by ideologies. • We are “subjects” of ideology in the sense that we are subject to them -- in same way that one is subject to the law of the State or sovereign.

Paradoxes of consumer culture •  Consumer culture pleases and reassures us while tapping

into anxieties and insecurities •  Ads cultivate anxiety and a sense of identity crisis by

offering visions of a better life and better self •  Ads present the paradox of an individuality that is to be

achieved through consumption of the by-products of mass consumption

•  Create “pseudo-individuality”, a trumped up sense of who and what we are based on what brands we buy

•  (branding is a process whereby a product is endowed with particular attributes that are indicative of a kind of lifestyle and produce an image of its potential consumer ~ this usually has little or nothing to do with the product)

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Identity is the pure product that we consume

Are you a Mac or a

PC?

• Louis Althusser stated that we are ‘hailed’ or summoned by ideologies, which recruit us as their ‘authors’ and their essential subject. There is, therefore, a militaristic aspect to interpellation. • One of the most blatant examples is the United States Army and Navy recruiting posters. • The iconic figure of Uncle Sam addresses the viewer directly

(James Montgomery Flagg, I Want You, United States Army Poster, 1916)

IMMEDIATE CONTEXT

Anything that has an immediate role in forming the message. Like written texts, visual texts (images) have: An author(s) An audience A subject A genre A purpose

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EACH IMAGE HAS A CAREFULLY SELECTED MEDIUM (TECHNOLOGY) AND A GENRE.

BROADER CONTEXT

Includes larger questions about the cultural, economic, social and historical circumstances in which image is produced and read.

WHO IS THE AUTHOR?

FOR MANY IMAGES, WE CAN IDENTIFY A PURPOSE AND POINT OF VIEW RATHER THAN AN INDIVIDUAL AUTHOR

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WHAT IS THE PURPOSE? (PURPOSE SHIFTS DEPENDING ON THE CONTEXT)

WHAT IS THE MEDIUM?

Genre ~ What type of text is it? Does the design serve the conventions of that form?

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Ideology ~ What political

issues are conveyed or

addressed by the image or

text?

Context – What is the intended purpose of the work?

Omissions ~ What is missing? What hasn’t been said?

WHAT IS THE SUBJECT? WHO IS THE AUDIENCE? HOW IS IT COMPOSED OR ARRANGED? WHAT IS THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT? WHAT ARE THE CULTURAL AND SOCIAL CONTEXTS? WHAT IS THE ECONOMIC CONTEXT? WHAT IS YOUR PERSONAL RESPONSE? HOW DOES THE TEXT WORK?

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Breakout rooms Analyze one of these ads.

Advertisers use four basic techniques to manipulate and motivate you

•  Appeal to basic human need for ‘Fun’ –  usually through branding

•  Appeal to basic human need for ‘Power’ –  through perceptions of beauty and the male gaze

•  Appeal to basic human need for ‘Love’ –  through product ‘lust’ or ‘envy’

•  Rewrite ‘Values Associations’ –  New lifestyle through appealing to ‘Freedom’ (most

frequently through nonconformity), ‘Frugalness’ (investments, retirement), etc.

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Analyze a superbowl commercial for your blog.

Volkswagen This ad appeals to the

basic human need for fun, spontaneity, play.

The marketing technique this ad is using is branding. Cool behaviour because of cool car?

Tag This ad appeals to the basic

human need for power. Tag makes the user feel attractive and important as evidenced by the number of girls who want to get close to the guy in the ad.

The marketing technique of perceptions of beauty as measure of power.

Pepsi

The ad illustrates the basic human need for fun.

A middle aged businessman is having fun playing with his drink by blowing bubbles with it.

The marketing technique used is values association, specifically nonconformity, youthfulness.

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Freedom 55 Basic human need fulfilled by this ad?

This ad uses the marketing technique of values association – frugalness as the road to luxury and freedom from work.