Welcome back!!! My group and I made the final decision for our genre and we chose… fashion and beauty!! We went back and forth whether we wanted to do travel or fashion and beauty but being that we cannot use pictures from the past, it made more sense to do beauty and fashion because our creativity and the progress of the images will be much easier to show if we take new images. We also agreed on the genre because we all did research about it on our previous posts, and personally I was mostly intrigued by it when I first did my post on the research I had acquired. This week, my research will be broader and more generic in the sense that I need to understand the target audience of this genre. Next week I will dig deeper and focus more on individual spreads to get inspiration and an entire realm of understanding. Baby steps!
The target audience for a beauty and fashion magazine is generally middle-high class women ages 18-54. I am saying generally because there are certain magazines that have a slightly different target audience, whether it is mainly targeting up to age 49, or there happen to be some beauty and fashion magazines that include a specific race or ethnicity in their T.A. “Cosmopolitan” magazine is a well-known beauty and fashion magazine that includes lifestyle articles and is notorious for their sex and career advice. They claim their target audience age ranges from 18-49 and has no specific race or ethnicity they seek to target. However “Essence” is also a beauty and fashion magazine with some hints of lifestyle, but this magazine increases their age to 54 and their main target is African-American women. Essence even has a slogan to promote this- “For the love of black women”. Even though magazines like “Essence” tend to target a very specific type of woman, they also tend to include men on their cover. Along with the alluring cover lines and pictures, when men are seen in an “Essence” cover, it is usually to attract women. For example, Michael B. Jordan is seen in a cover of this magazine with the cover line “Up close and personal with our fave bae”. This cover line intrigues ME! I don’t entirely think that a cover like this will draw in the majority of the men out there, but the female attraction is much more present. “Essence” also features many empowering women on their covers. By having women like Michelle Obama and Oprah, that immediately boosts the ‘empowering black women’ element that “Essence” is all about. “Cosmopolitan” seems to have a pattern or continuity with how they show women on the cover page. It usually consists of a medium-long shot of a woman- actress, model, comedian, singer, etc. Staying true to their main source of attraction, Cosmo keeps it sexy with cover lines such as “Summer Sex Q&A” and “Let them Look”. Something that fashion and beauty magazines all have in common and seem to focus on one way or another is showing how women should be appreciated and empowered. The beauty in these magazines is not just focused on the physical. Yes, I know that does sound cheesy but it is the reality. These magazines also include online issues for easier and quicker access. Since beauty and fashion magazines include monthly issues, this calls for monthly subscriptions. The usual price is $9.95, but magazines that target higher end women, such as “Vogue”, can go up to $18.00 for a year’s worth of issues.
Talk to you on my next post,
Tini
Citations:
Popular Women's Fashion Magazines. (n.d.). Retrieved from
https://artsentertainment.knoji.com/top-5-womens-fashion-magazines/
https://artsentertainment.knoji.com/top-5-womens-fashion-magazines/
A Deeper Look into Fashion and Beauty Magazines. (n.d.). Retrieved from
http://sites.psu.edu/katewahlfye/2015/07/14/a-deeper-look-into-fashion-and-beauty-magazines/
http://sites.psu.edu/katewahlfye/2015/07/14/a-deeper-look-into-fashion-and-beauty-magazines/
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