A Study Of Ideologies Behind Visual And Linguistic Representations Of Men In International Vogue Magazine (american / Asian / Arabic)

Résumé: The purpose of the present study is to investigate the ideologies behind the visual representation of men in international Vogue magazine (American/ Asian / Arabic). The corpus consists of fifteen images five from American, six from Asian and four from Arabic vogue magazine. The study has three objectives. First, it analyzes men’s images in the three different magazine relying on Kress and Leeuwen’s (2006) “Grammar of Visual Design”. Second, it analyzes the writings (main cover subject) from each cover adopting David Machin’s(2007) six dimensions (weight, slope, curvature, connectivity, orientation and flourishes. Third, it searches for the ideologies behind the visual representations in each magazine. To reach these aims, the qualitative method research is adopted. The multimodal analysis of the selected images has revealed that men are represented in a globalized style, since the pictures share the same features in all the three meanings. Vogue shows that fashion is made not just for women, but could be for men also wherever their social status. Then, the analysis of typography shows that the majority of writings have the same characteristics in relation to the six dimensions in the three different magazines. The visual and typographical analyses turn out the relation between the images and the writings which is complementary; i.e, the writings were providing a description of the model (harshness, masculinity, simplicity, complexity, elegance, unity and the feelings of the models). The third study was about the ideologies behind the visual representation of men in the international Vogue magazines. In fact, two ideologies are depicted: globalization and ethnocentrism. The first means that Vogue shows all men in a globalized way to break down the cultural, religious and status differences by adopting the same fashion style for all the models. The second means that Vogue wants to shed light only on the American culture

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