The Representation ofWomen in Vogue Magazines of 1970 and of 2017: A Social Semiotic and ideological Perspectives Study

Abstract

The present study purports itself to investigate the representation of women in two selected American Magazines: Vogue Magazine 1970 and Vogue Magazine 2017.The corpus consists of twelve visual images. This research is centred on three objectives. First, it analyses the way women are portrayed visually in the images of the selected magazines relying ‘Visual Grammar’ proposed by Kress and Van Leeuwen (1996, 2006). Second, it explores how women are represented culturally and the reasons behind their representations in the selected magazines by adopting Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s framework in Dialectic of Enlightenment named ‘the Culture Industry’(2002). Third, this study seeks to relate the two mentioned perspectives (visual and ideological) in studying the evolution of the representation of women in American Vogue Magazines. To reach these aims, the qualitative method research is adopted. The examination of the selected images by both visual and cultural analysis has revealed that women are represented differently in the selected magazines, since, Vogue Magazine 1970 show women as working and self reliant ones while Vogue Magazine 2017 portrays them in a more photoshoped, highly eroticized pauses, these two different representations are due the association of Vogue Magazine in ‘Culture Industry’.