Konsumeristlike elustiilide konstrueerimine väljaandes Hooaeg

Date

2008

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Tartu Ülikool

Abstract

Description

The bachelor thesis focuses on the ways consumerist lifestyles are being constructed in the adverzine Hooaeg, a customer magazine of a leading Estonian retailer, Tallinna Kaubamaja AS. The aim of the study is to cast light on the ways of representing consumerism in fashion, beauty and home decor-related texts; as well as to describe the verbal and grammatical structures and elements, stylistic and graphic devices that are used to give certain guidelines to the readers, with the aim of encouraging them to follow lifestyles that can be described as consumerist. The paper draws on theories of consumer culture and postmodernism for the purpose of explaining the concept of lifestyle and the ways in which it relates to issues of domination and hegemony in a society. A claim is made that lifestyles are being deliberately constructed and used by the marketing industry, in order to facilitate the sale of commodities. The customer magazine is a journalistic format that, by combining journalistic pseudo-objective contents with elements of advertising, serves as a vehicle of advocating and spreading consumerist lifestyles to the public. Norman Fairclough’s method of critical discourse analysis was used in the empirical part of the paper, in which four texts from the latest (spring 2007 and spring 2008) issues of Hooaeg have been analyzed. The study showed the occurrence of three main discoursive repertoires in the texts – these include the discourses of beauty, fashion and that of gender identities. The first of the three is characterized by putting „outer“ beauty into the spotlight – beauty in this discourse is not a quality that lets itself be discovered step-by-step, but something that has to be seen from afar. The discourse of beauty is almost exclusively associated with the female sex and this is one of the reasons why the discourse of gender identities becomes relevant in this context. The discourse of fashion reveals a solicitation of seasonal consumption that is caused by the selfish motives of the publisher – the variation of fashion seasons enables to create the need for acquiring new goods. An important issue in that is how readers/consumers are implicitly being threatened with the loss of social acceptance, should they fail to follow fashion trends. The study also reveals the inconsistent nature of fashion recommendations – virtually anything can be in fashion, as long as it is in line with the publisher’s interests. Gender identities in the texts are represented in a stereotypical way – the purpose of a woman is to look attractive and charm men, while the latter obtain the role of a passive pleasure-seeker. Women are depicted as irrational shopaholics, whose perception of the seasons changing is limited to dreaming of a new dress. Of the attributes of consumerism, five are apparent in the texts. These include: preferring certain clothing brands; considering fit of clothing more important than price; considering brand of clothing more important than price; following a specific style of home-decoration; preferring certain cosmetics brands. The analysis of different styles present in the texts showed the prevalence of advertising style, while style of the expert discourse, “street style” and conversational style were less visible. The style of the fashion caption was not present in the texts analyzed. The prevalence of advertising style confirms that the adverzine is a part of the paradigm of advertising, and renders the objectivity claim of its contents less plausible.

Keywords

H Social Sciences (General), bakalaureusetööd

Citation