Intro to Fashion Studies

Learning Portfolio Post 2

Project Description: “Post an advertisement for a fashion brand and explain how gender is portrayed through the clothing, models, etc. Does the advertisement reinforce traditional gender norms or does it subvert them? Include one quote from Fashion and Cultural Studies to support your answer.”

“Clearly, sex sells, and it is usually women’s bodies that are represented and “consumed.” Yet it is not only women’s bodies, but more accurately it is most often young, thin, white women’s bodies that are represented and consumed as objects of beauty in hegemonic cultural discourse.”

-Susan Kaiser, Fashion and Cultural Studies, 2010, 129.

 

This advertisement, made for a Dior 2004 collection, features a scandalous woman in pink lingerie surrounded by pink, “girly” purses. The collection, called “Girl Collection”, is made up up light pink and white purses with bows, hearts, and butterflies, seemingly “girly” things. This shows two typical contemporary associations with femininity: sex and pink.

The model, a very thin woman, might have been used to market the collection towards older women. The purses could have been seen as childish, so the model used would have been useful to show older women that they could be sexy, even with these “girly” purses.

The whole ad is very expected. Theres a “young, thin, white woman” dressed (and posed!) very sexually, surrounded by girly accessories. It blends many associations and traditional views of femininity to sell the “Girly Collection” to girly women.