Vouge Media Language Flashcards
What is Vouge? (context)
A high end fashion magazine that stared as a weekly issue in … which now appears years later as a monthly magazine.
Who is the primary target audience? (context)
Upper middle class due to the expense of the products advertised.
Why were women now being targeted by fashion magazines? (context)
What is the function of a magazine cover? (context)
Identify the codes and conventions as it is the first thing that the audience will see and it must briefly establish what is covered withing the mag and the main image must be related to the themes inside.
Introduction to Roland Barthes and analysis of vouge front cover. (analysis)
‘The idea that texts communicate their meanings through the process of denotation, the literal meaning and the level of connotation involving the multiple meanings suggested by the image.”
What are the connotations of the font styles used? Are they sans serif? Modern or Traditional? (analysis)
-sophisticated and classy aesthetic
-conforms to house style and highlights aristocratic house style
-serif fonts used (Times New Roman)
-short decorative lines like seen on the mast head which projects a traditional look.
What does the colour scheme of the magazine cover connote? (analysis)
-Soft blue and aquatic greens symbolise ideas of the ocean and travel.
masthead washed in green hue- sophisticated high end nature of the magazine.
What is significant about the positioning of the different elements on the cover? (analysis)
-Sophia Loren medium close up and centre framed with a use of high key lighting to accentuate her natural beauty while promoting the ‘summer madness’ theme.
How does the use of alliteration impact the reader? (analysis)
-Designed to promote stories in set edition.
-entice the audience to purchase and consume the themes of summer.
What is the function of the imperative? (analysis)
‘how to scintillate almost everywhere’
-sensationalises the body image in a way that is desirable to the audiences identities and consumption.
What is a paradigm?
a set of related signs that the encoder can choose from i.e. the set font style the magazine producer may choose.
What is a Syntagm? (analysis)
a combination of signs that are linked together in a particular way to convey the same or similar meaning.
Analysis of cutext advertisement. (analysis)
-constructs a feminine identity of youth beauty and sexuality.
-medium close up framed to the left
-‘bare essentials’ refers to the lack of costume but also the nude colours of the products .
-being ‘bare’ is both liberating for women and desirable for heterosexual men.
-attention is drawn to the characters nails and lips due to the soft colours and high key lights.
Justify why the vouge set text is a binary opposite to war time austerity.
‘the idea that meaning is dependant upon pairs of oppositions and the way in which the binary oppositions are resolved can have particular ideological significance.’ (Claude Levi Straus)
Justify why the vouge set text is a binary opposite to war time austerity. Rise of consumerism in the 50s and 60s. (theory)
-as wartime austerity gave way to a new era of economic prosperity, women’s mags were seen to enter a new phase .
-for example, having gone through a ‘make-do and mend’ phase in the 1940s middle market women’s magazines became part of the ‘shop and spend’ euphoria of the 1950s and 1960s.
