Fashion articles.By Stella and Pip

Hypothesis.

1. We believe there’ll be significantly more Latinate and elevated lexis present in the older articles. This is due to the fact this was the lexicon the target audience of Vogue (which was the upper class) practiced. 2. Also, that more gender stereotypes will be present in the older articles. since this reflects the society in which they lived in. Furthermore, it might be a much more formal article. 3. We believe in both articles there will be pictures of slim females who are there to display the clothes and portray the ‘perfect’ female’. 4. Lastly, we believe that over the years the target audience for Vogue being the upper class may have shifted toward the middle.This being due to people in more recent years having more money and being able to afford the magazine. We think the shift in target audience will be represented via the sentence structures, lexis and discourse.

Methodology

We first looked at editor’s letters from recent catalogues of Vogue and found the one from the July issue 2012 interesting. It was about style, individuality and items of clothing to wear all year around, so we decided to search for an older editorial that contained the same sort of topics.We accessed the Vogue’s archive and found an editorial from 1921 that contained information about style and individuality too, therefore complementing the newer letter.

Lexis.

The lexis in the articles at times contrasts. In the 1921 editorial, more elevated lexis appears such as ‘garment’, ‘distinction’ and ‘conforming’, compared to more simple terms in the 2012 editorial. ‘want’, ‘great’ and ‘ditto’.

However although some of the lexis in the 2012 editorial may be less formal, it still has features that we would link to upper class audiences, such as both articles using the impersonal pronoun ‘One’, which is not as commonly used nowadays, and only really seen in speeches like the one made by the queen every year. This represents how the formality and class of vogue is still very high.

Both articles use the 3rd person pronoun ‘We’ and ‘Our’ representing their power being the body of Vogue.

Nouns are also repetitively embedded throughout both editorials which we would expect from a magazine promoting fashion and trends. Nouns such as ‘vest’, ‘jacket’ and ‘neck cloth’ all are featured.

Grammar.

A significant point here is that neither of the editorials use contractions such as ‘can’t’ instead of cannot. We believe this is because Vogue is an elite magazine unlike ‘Heat’ or ‘Okay’, and therefore uses more formal lexis to stray away from anything that could be considered slang.

Grapholoy. Images from 1920’s Vogue. Images from 2012 Vogue.

Discourse.The discourse structure for both editorials was that of a typical

magazine/newspaper report, in columns and paragraphs. However, interesting point is that both articles conclude on

style, and are saying the same message- that style is more than buying fashionable clothes.

Pragmatics

The older editorial includes words and phrases that would not be accepted in todays society. For example, writing ‘some ugly women’. Calling a woman ugly would not be accepted in todays generation because of the general idea of female empowerment and individuality. It’s also fair to say the older editorial includes stereotypes of women, saying they ‘must have a natural love for clothes’ and ‘wear ones clothes with elegance’. Conforming to the ideals that were held by society at the time where women had to be ‘lady like’.

The different time periods are also illustrated by the names of icons in the editorials. For example, in the 1921 article, the famous louis the 16th was mentioned, it assumes people in that time period know who the figure is, which is why when we look at it, we understand this is an old article as he was royalty that the generation would’ve been more familiar with. Just the same as in the recent editorials icons such as Cara delevingne and Yoko Ono are mentioned, people who in the current time period are very familiar with.

2012.

1921.

Pragmatically, this shows that the words used in both articles were different. The deontic modal verb ‘must’ is shown as one of the most used words in the 1921 editorial, portraying that it is considered a necessity for women to conform to the gender stereotypes at the time which consisted of being fashionable.

Conclusion

We found out that there were more Latinate and elevated lexis in the olden text like we predicted, although not a lot. This, along with the use of the impersonal pronoun ‘one’ in both the new and old editorials, suggests that the target audience may not have shifted as much as we thought. We believed it would have now included the middle classes, so would use more informal pronouns such as ‘you’, which it does not. This makes it seem more formal than we originally thought it would.The gender stereotypes are stronger in the 1921 article, which confirms one of our hypotheses. However, they both contain the subject of individuality which moves away from the ideas of conformity that prevailed in those times

Evaluation

We found it very difficult to find articles that related to each other from the different periods, so spent a lot of time researching. But we were still really interested in the concept of there being differences in the fashion writing so instead of giving up on the idea we finally found two that were similar and could use

The amount of time we spent on the research could be why we did not get as much quantitative evidence as we would have liked.

We still find the topic interesting, but if we were to do it again we would spend less time finding the articles and more time analysing the texts.

Bibliography.

Vogue archive- http://search.proquest.com/vogue/ Vogue 1921 article- http://

search.proquest.com/vogue/docview/904309082/D30E66E088DB434APQ/1?accountid=15833

Google images (for recent vogue images) https://images.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl

Concordle- http://folk.uib.no/nfylk/concordle/ Vogue 2012 July magazine