Fashion articles.By Stella and Pip

Hypothesis.

1. We believe there’ll be significantly more Latinate and elevated lexis present in the older articles. 2. Also, that more gender stereotypes will be present in the older articles.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.

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.

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. 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. It’s also fair to say the older editorial includes stereotypes of women. The different time periods are also illustrated by the names of icons in the editorials.

2012.

1921.

Conclusion

We found out that there were more Latinate and elevated lexis in the olden text like we predicted, although not a lot.

The gender stereotypes are stronger in the 1921 article, which confirms one of our hypotheses.

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.

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