Influence of Magazines on Indian Women

Cosmopolitan is the queen of women’s magazines. Her royal court also consists of Glamour, Red Book, Vogue, and other smaller magazines. These magazines demonstrate these beauty standards. Naomi Wolf researched on body image and found a

Glamour, Life & Style, Vogue, Elle, Cosmopolitan, and People; what do you see when you open these magazines? Women who are beautiful, young, flawless, sexy, flirty, provocative, fashionable, seductive, innocent, and happy. What do you think as you look at the pages in the magazine? I would like to look like her. What do you say to your self when you see the product? Will this product help me look like her?

In this report I have focused on Vogue magazine. Vogue is a product from the magazine publisher Conde Nast which publishes magazines including Glamour, GQ and Vanity Fair.

Why are magazines that specialize in fashion particularly useful for cosmetologists? Magazines that specialize in fashion can predict what the hottest new trends in fashion are going to be.

Magazines soon became vital to advertising, companies began to buy pages in magazines to advertise new products, new movies, and new everything. Many of the other pages were filled with poems written by returning war veterans and images representing life during the 1920s. Vogue and other fashion magazines modeled the new “Flapper” image. Flappers were young girls, who during the 1920s, began to break the rules and transform the way the nation viewed women. Kelly Sagert explained in her book “Flappers: A Guide to an American Subculture (2010),” “Tabloids, sectioned off parts of magazines, had huge articles and images commenting on the popularity of the flapper image, inspiring readers to either follow in the image or accept it within society” (Kelly 37). While the fashion magazines had the flappers to focus on, other magazines like Time and LIFE focused more on current events and politics. They would also feature a successful celebrity every now and

Right of the bat, the 1950s saw magazine and publishing companies facing an exponential growth in popularity. Due in part to the public’s fear of both the “Cold War” and the “Korean War”, family oriented magazines like The Saturday Evening Post and Look continued to post articles highlighting current events, fictional stories, family life and illustration. As they grew to the top of the consumer market, women became the primary demographic for these magazines. The most prolific magazines in the women's market where Ladies Home Journal, Woman’s Day, Woman’s Home Companion, Good Housekeeping, Redbook, McCall’s and Cosmopolitan. (www.illustrationhistory.org)

Stylist magazine features high end content that includes fashion, travel, beauty, people and careers news. Judging from the general content included in Stylist, such as aging creams, expensive perfumes and its ‘intelligent approach-covering a broader range of culture and tackling issues women face in their professional and personal lives’-it is evident that Stylist succeeds in attracting their intended target audience. Stylist aims to target affluent 20-40 year old female commuters and according to their media kit, Stylist’s typical reader are women of the average age of 33, with 7 out of 10 unmarried and with no children. Despite attracting this particular target audience it can be argued that- with Stylist’s vibrant front covers and fun features such as temporary tattoos,ways to deal with hangovers and make-up tutorials,Stylist is luring in younger readers thus expanding their audience as a whole.

Being one of the top branded women’s magazines gives them an opening to larger audiences. The fact they are easily able to pull in celebrities makes can broaden its audience even further. Even if a woman hasn’t even heard of Cosmo on its own personally, if they hear a celebrity they adore is a part of it they are more likely to read it. By reading the magazine the female becomes more influenced by it. Younger women and teenagers have a possibility of being pulled in due to wanting to be like the people they idolize. We such a big following on its own though, this magazine has been shaping the way generations of women think and act. Some of this which is not all good. Cosmo puts high emphasis on appearance and pleasing men. This magazine convinces women that’s how it is. It would make it hard for these women to act more natural and not feel like they have to constantly be on alert. It gives an image to women in our society you have to be physically perfect to get and keep a man. That statement in itself just isn’t true. This message can take a toll and make young and older women think they are not good enough. On top of the fact that some of the advice given is just ridicoulous. I read through some articles and laughed a little. Some of the so called “tips” are just so unrealistic. It partially made me uncomfortable to read them. The “positions” certainly didn’t sound sexy

On another note, we can also see how this magazine attracts women. Most women care for clothes and jewelry, others care for the artistic aspect of another culture. I’ve scanned through the entire magazine, and I have not seen a gadget that a man might be interested in, which is why we can infer that women are most likely to be the audience that this magazine aims to attract.

The fashion industry is rapidly growing and constantly generating new fashion trends almost weekly. Fashion for some may seem ridiculous and unnecessary; but fashion is not just a meaningless usage of article of clothing or farcical materials sew together for coverage. There is more to fashion than meets the eyes, fashion is precious and significant. It is a reflection of self-image, it speak the ream about who we are and how we review ourselves. Not only is fashion the reflection of self-image but also the reflection of our history as Coco Channel have said, “Fashion is not something that exist in dresses only. Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening.” Fashion

Since its introduction to the world in December of 1892 Vogue has gone about as the central form counselor for the socialites of tomorrow, setting up the garments drifts in the interminably developing universe of design. Vogue is presently distributed in eighteen nations, universally extending the legacy and impact of the design wonder. In spite of Vogue's concentrate on the brief form vibes existing apart from everything else, the magazine has kept up its status as the managing voice in first class design styles for almost 120 years.

The final magazine I will be examining is Marie Claire. This is another publication aimed at a more mature audience, with a deeper focus on beauty through materialism. Like Complete Woman, it contains more explicit sexual detail and a more serious focus on relationships. Also, because of its abundance of advertisements of expensive cosmetics and clothing, we may assume that this magazine is class-specific to a wealthier consumer. Marie Claire’s cover stories include “What Your Style Says About You”, “How to Get Perfect Skin: 44 Products that Really Work”, “How Often Do You Have Sex?”, “Men: What They Don’t Want You To Do”, and “428 Fashion and Beauty Ideas”.

For this research, the unit of observation are magazines as obviously will be making my observations in magazines. What are the reasons for choosing this medium? Convenience, easy to secure, and also it is quite easy to analyse compared to other mediums. However, there is one important criterion for magazines, such as they have to be in English language as it will be important in identifying gender stereotyping in the writing. Though, there are criteria that are not important to me such as the genre (men’s and women’s magazine) and also, the magazines will not be filtered in terms of their release date

Ferguson (1983) conducted a study of young women’s magazines and found that they promote a traditional idea of femininity. They promoted the idea that girls should aspire to be beautiful in order to get a husband (Andrew Pilkington and Alan Yeo (2009)). It is true that some women might want it but in most the cases they learn it from their mothers or the media. For instance, girls should wear pink and boys should wear blue, this is another stereotype, which is in our heads since we were children.

It shows different ways to wear an outfit or what piece of apparel can go with another piece of apparel. It is a magazine that is like a guide to fashion around the country.