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are (Fig.4) outlines a spectrum of young female sexuality. The term “sex”, meaning a quality of sexual experience, is set in opposition to “innocence” against their negations. From this we derive the four identities: “wife” and “virgin”, both socially positive terms, and “slut” and “pervert”—the most cryptic of the four, including a host of sub-identities: sexual deviance, homosexuality, frigidity, and abstinence—both socially negative. Fashion advertising as a whole— including teen magazines, bridal magazines, homemaker magazines, etc—could be said to travel this spectrum and outline it’s socially acceptable boundaries.

 

Within High Fashion advertising, the identities of “wife” and “virgin” are fairly absent—or only exist as limiting elements of the other two identities. Instead, the images seem to navigate the spectrum between “slut” and “pervert”, but only in the sense of defining the envelope of what is acceptable, meaning what is the farthest stretch of the center of the square, after which the “slut” becomes the true slut, the “pervert” becomes the true pervert, and thereby no longer socially acceptable. Again, because of the feedback loop between the reader searching for Alter-Ego and the image producing machine, the advertisers are in a position of constant expansion of this envelope. In order to shock the reader into alter-identification, they must always one-up themselves from their last presented images.

 

This can be seen in the spreads and advertisements of smaller, less distributed High Fashion magazines, which strive to position themselves on the very fringe of what is acceptable, in comparison to their larger versions, such as W magazine. Considering a set of spread images from W magazine (Fig.5) and Zinc magazine (Fig.6), we see the sexual identity of “pervert” pushed to its socially acceptable extreme in the form of images of necrophilia, cannibalism, and homosexuality, where W stays within the safer bounds of implied masturbation and “slut” imagery. This constant striving for “shock” within the alter-identification experience causes a sort of hysteria, constantly bombarding the reader with new images of what is acceptable and what is not.

 

Again, we can see that High Fashion media serves a promotional function for its consumers in the arena of sexual identity. Types or cuts of clothing that would be identified with “slut” or “pervert” are put within the socially acceptable realm when associated with High Fashion—think of the dresses worn at the academy awards, versus those worn outside by the prostitutes on the strip. The emotive shock value presented in artistic imagery is translated to the product. In this way, the High Fashion imagery has a very real effect on culture. As new shocks become accepted and passé, the image producing machine must invent new areas or push boundaries farther, toying with taboo and hysterical contradictions of identity: the virgin slut, the perverted wife.

 

This is to say that the advertising has both a quantitative and qualitative effect on the social Alter-Ego. It is only 本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。