A Study on the Ideologies of the Clothing Advertisements in Women's Monthly Magazines

여성잡지 의류광고에 나타난 이데올로기 연구

Advertisements provide consumers with in-formation and knowledge about products and help a society to sustain homogeneity by actively reflecting important characteristics of mass culture. Yet this reflection is a selective and purposeful representation by the party of the fashion manufactures and carries the intention of stimulating and augmenting desire for commodities aiming to perpetuate capitalism. This study understood this selective reflection of mass culture by advertisements as a feature of hegemonic struggle between/fashion business and consumers and defined the values selected by advertisements as ideologies supporting the consumption ideology of capitalism. The purpose of this study was to examine the contents of the ideologies expressed in the clothing advertisements in women's magazines to persuade consumers into consumption. The method of study was mainly qualitative with subsidiary citations from the results of content analysis. The objects of analysis were clothing advertisements in 1996 issues of CeCi and Woman Sense, which were identified as the two most popular women's monthly magazines. The ideologies identified were ideologies concerning (1) Self Identity, (2) Sensibility, (3) Sex Role, (4) Globalism, (5) Youth, (6) Leas-ure and Pleasure. Repeated and insisted as natural and true, there values were proposed to be believed as common senses and studies re-port that values of advertisements are ac-cepted as more readily as they are more unreasonable, and the acts and behaviors expres-sed within advertisements are often imitated in real life situations. Therefore, it is highly probable that these values emphasized within advertisements are enacted in thoughts and behaviors of consumers' real life. Accordingly the author suggests that critical interpretation of advertisements is seriously required to fully understand the commodity ridden post industrial society of today and to lead a subjective life within it.