To understand the meaning of an advertisement, we have to understand how advertisements work. Visual communication plays a crucial part in fashion and fragrance advertising, as it sparks up our imagination and helps in the process of creating a desire for the product. However, messages in advertisements are not always transparent. Subliminality in advertising is the spark that ignites many issues that are present in society and are being kept alive with the help of the media. One of the issues that I will focus on in my diploma work is the wrong portrayal of women in the media. Fashion and fragrance brands use the female body to increase sales, by creating visual narratives that fulfill the male voyeuristic needs. My diploma work, which explores the effects and challenges of fragrance advertising and the representations of women in advertising, is based on French designer Jean Paul Gaultier's perfume ads for his 'Le Male', and 'So Scandal!' fragrance. My methodologies include a visual communication analysis and a semiotic analysis, which helped me to get the answer on how the fragrance industry creates desire and how women in visual narratives 'help' to create that creation of desire.
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