Exploring media language
- Women's lifestyle magazine conventions - focus on makeup and fashion, Stereotypical representation of women. Conservatively dressed and covered up
- Very few changes over many decades
- Close of of female models face, positioning the audience right in front of her.
- A pleasant mode of address. Highly conventional, especially for lifestyle magazine
- High key lighting hides nothing, and adds to a sense of reality and believability for the target audience
- Floral dress is symbolic of femininity
- Font is feminine: dainty, soft, lacks sharp edges, and may be a comment on the target audience
- Mixture of serif and sans serif font, portrays different feelings, emotions and responses. However, clashes, aesthetically displeasing
- Logo is not particularly fancy, and looks as if it has been hand written with a paintbrush. Informal, and potentially condescending
- Limited range of colours: pastels popular in the 1960's
- Eye-level shot: allows a direct and comforting mode of address
- Image clearly edited. Extremely white teeth, eyes and clear skin. Heavily airbrushed in order to make model stereotypically attractive
- Colour palette: stereotypically feminine
- Lighting: high key lighting connotes friendliness, comfort, attractiveness.
- Model: smiling, relaxed, comforting: or is it forced! Model looks timid, scared, out of place. A model, perhaps inexperienced
- Face completely uncovered, suggesting confidence or vulnerability. Perhaps suggesting polysemic readings
- Selection of model: 30+, not particularly glamorous clothes, targeting a middle aged, working class female audience
- Hair is plain, and conservative and practical
- Golden bar at bottom connotes wealth, luxury and hyperbole
- Bottom cover line: seven star improvements for your kitchen: assumes a target audience who stay at home at cook
- Are you an A-level Beauty suggests a stereotypical assumption that women must be attractive in order to succeed in life.
- Improvements for kitchen suggests that contemporary women were required to stay at home and look after a kitchen
- Lack of copy, uncluttered, insinuates a lack of education of the target female audience
- White copy connotes innocence and purity
- All topics are not only stereotypically female, but also arguably are focused on women appealing to men, for example: "lingerie goes lively". Link to male gaze theory (assumption that women are to be looked at by heterosexual men)
- World's greatest weekly for women: use of superlative and hyperbolic language suggests that the target audience can achieve greatness by purchasing the magazine
- Alfred Hitchcock: director of the Birds, North By Northwest and Psycho is asked to talk about women. Suggests the target female audience have no interest in arts and hobbies
- Silent woman forms binary opposition with a talkative man. Woman positioned to be looked at by target audience
- Secondary audience: men who wish their wives would live hegemonic beauty standards displayed in the magazine
- Happy main character invites audience to themselves live a happy life
Thanks Q and S block for the analysis!