COSMONAUTiCAL•net Be A Good Girl: Selling Femininity
Stereotype #1 about women is that we love shopping for clothes and accessories, which is probably why Bitch Magazine and Vogue both have advertisements for apparel retailers. (That, or because everyone in their intended audience wears clothes - unless they live in a nudist colony.) Bitch and Vogue are both magazines targeted towards women, but that is where their similarities end. Bitch is a low cost, black and white feminist magazine dedicated to critiquing pop culture. Vogue is a high end, full color fashion magazine. Their advertisements reflect this difference even while selling the same product category, in this case, clothing and accessories.
The advertisement in Bitch that this paper will focus on is for an online apparel retailer, Feminine Principle. The advertisement from Vogue is for Louis Vuitton. Unfortunately, it’s not really clear exactly what either of these companies sell. Does Louis Vuitton only sell that purse, or are the shoes and dress also available? On the other hand, Feminine Principle gives no images of their products at all.
Instead, Feminine Principle attempts to associate it with a pseudo-Celtic ideology of pagan high priestesses and warrior women. “Embrace your magnificent feminine self,” says the ad copy, which in adspeak translates roughly to “buy from us and you’ll be a good feminist.” The ad copy stresses a very “Earth Mother” approach, emphasizing women’s supposedly inherent mystery and wisdom, an imaginary community and continuity among all women.
This in contrast to the woman alone in the Louis Vuitton advertisements. She sits in an empty high end restaurant, looking at the camera and posing as if for an unseen spectator. There is an element of mystery in her sultry gaze, as well as the mystery of “why would you sit like that?” In one of the four pages this advertisement takes up, our model sits with one leg high in the air; she doesn’t look comfortable at all. In fact, she looks as though she’s about to fall off the chair. She is Caucasian, with long blonde hair; this is worth noting because she is one of innumerable white models in fashion magazines and this advertisement doesn’t only say “buy this and you will be extremely wealthy, surprisingly flexible and completely (conventionally) gorgeous,” it gives viewers a very specific, depressingly common, definition of what it means for women to be beautiful: long legged, skinny, and white.
The Feminine Principle advertisement has no models, only a Celtic trinity knot and a tiny shamrock. While at first glance this advertisement appears to be intentionally “color blind” about racial demographics because there are no people, that is not the case. Trinity knots and shamrocks are associated with western Europe, particularly Scotland and Ireland, which are both predominantly Caucasian.
While the Feminine Principle advertisement in Bitch takes a plain-folks approach with a quarter page advertisement that looks as though it was put together in PowerPoint, the Louis Vuitton advertisement goes for the snob-appeal approach with an extremely polished look; a perfectly coiffed model sits in a professionally lit set on four high gloss, full color pages. These design styles reflect the nature of their publications; Bitch is a grassroots, feminist, independently owned and operated magazine, whereas Vogue is a high end, haut couture fashion magazine.
Despite their differences in design approaches, both advertisements imply that their products will make you stand out from the crowd. Feminine Principle sells “unique apparel” and Louis Vuitton’s merchandise is “sold exclusively at Louis Vuitton stores and on louisvuitton.com” (emphasis added; italics would spoil the effect of their postmodern, minimalist sans-serif typeface, a stark contrast to the pseudo-calligraphic glowing font on the Feminine Principles advertisement).
At first glance, the black and white Feminine Principles advertisement that takes up one-fourth of a page and the full color Louis Vuitton advertisement that takes up four pages appear to have nothing in common beyond a female target audience that wears clothes. On closer inspection, they have more in common than one would expect for an ad in a feminist magazine and an ad in a fashion magazine. They both imply individuality, stereotype women as mysterious in some way and do nothing to combat invisible whiteness; that is, the idea of whiteness as a cultural norm is alive and kicking in both of these advertisements. Ultimately, despite the differences in the publications, it should not come as a surprise that these two advertisements are so similar. They don’t only have female target audiences, they’re both selling something, and that is the biggest similarity there could be because no matter what tactics an advertiser uses, selling a product is the ultimate goal.