• Journal of the Korean Society of Clothing and Textiles
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• v.29 no.2
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• pp.267-278
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• 2005

Fashion luxury products, which used to mean high-quality, handcrafted not-so-trendy items, are nowadays regarded as expensive fashion merchandise produced under the name of imported well-known brands. People cunsuming fashion luxury products distinguish themselves from other people according to the luxury fashion brands they are using, and as a result, advertisements of fashion luxury products are taken as a kind of international language. The purpose of this study is to point out the socio-cultural meanings of consuming fashion luxury products, by analyzing images shown in advertisements of fashion luxury products focusing on women's images. To do so, this study is based on general theoretical background on fashion, consumer culture advertising and analysis advertisements of fashion luxury products shown in fashion magazines in recent three years. The result of this study is as follows; The images of the advertisements of fashion luxury products could be categorized as (1) elegance, (2) kitsch and (3) fetish. Elegance is a taste of high society, aesthetically chic and feminine. Fashion luxury products, which are merchandise of extravagance, dignity, refinement, feminity and harmony, exhibit high-quality grace through their advertisements. Kitsch represents the vulgar and popular images of trivial commodities of industrial society. In the advertisement of fashion luxury product, it is shown as inappropriateness, excessiveness, stereotyped pleasantness, exaggeration an playful satisfaction. Finally, fetish images represent erotic or perverted sexuality, based on psychoanalytic fetishism which objects are regarded s substitute of sexual orgasm. The advertisements of fashion luxury product are characterized as (1) popularization of luxury, (2) objectification of sex and body, and (3) re-aestetification of anti-aesthetics. The asvertisements of fashion luxury products are actually targeted to the middle class with successful career women's images. They objectify female bodies through fetishistic images. Also, the deviant subcultural style, represented a new kind of cultural capital, is now reproduced as a new commodity aesthetics.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.15 no.8
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• pp.149-155
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• 2015

This research tried to project hidden and overall side of market economy system of capitalism through desire and fetishism of consumer society. The objective of this research lies in examining desire code of capitalism society through hidden side of consumer society and the reason why modern people are crazy about products, the meaning of product re-creation in tempting modern consumer society, life where all desire is satisfied by products. As a result, we intended to demonstrate that post-industrial society is the one triggered by desire and that society desired in post-industrial society is the very cultural, social study realized to enable modern people to survive in modern society through Martin Parr's pictures.

• The Research Journal of the Costume Culture
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• v.26 no.6
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• pp.823-835
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• 2018

The body is an important object of costume expression, and the reflection of the aesthetics of the body according to age, culture, individual or group determines the form of the costume. In particular, British artist Leigh Bowery provided many designers and celebrities with original design ideas. Leigh Bowery's costumes are related to the carnival concept. Thus, this study analyzed Leigh Bowery's life and works, and examined Michael Bakhtin's grotesque carnivalesque theory. Based on Bakhtin's carnival theory around 100 works by Leigh Bowery, in the form of YouTube videos and DVD clips were analyzed in this study. The results of the analysis Leigh Bowery's body and costume research are as follows. First, this study can define fetishism as a characteristic of costumes such as body suits, harnesses, high-heeled boots, and stockings, that stress the body. Second, the character of the body is not expressed as that of an idealized body, but the fat and ugly aspect are revealed. Third, Leigh Bowery's costumes are characterized by ambiguity. The costumes blur the boundaries between women and men. Fourth, common sense, combined with normal and bizarre, brings out a strong sense of carnival humor with ridiculousness arising from the gap between reality and reality. His performance has had a significant impact on victims of discrimination or unequal treatment in sexual, racial, and age-related situations. This study should inspire many designers through the study of Leigh Bowery's body expression and dress, but it also introduces fashion icons that are not well known in Korea.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.5
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• pp.865-883
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• 2009

The mock-heroic, "the single most characteristic and individual literary form of the neoclassical era," as Brean Hammond puts it, epitomizes the process of the "novelization" of the 18th-century British culture. Bakhtin mentions that when the novel reigns supreme, almost all the remaining genres are "novelized"; Hammond borrows the term "novelization" from Bakhtin and uses it as a "shorthand way of referring to the cultural forces that render epic anachronistic." Indebted to Hammond's apprehension of novelization, this paper reads Alexander Pope's Rape of the Lock in the context of novelization, particularly focusing on 'probability,' 'contemporaneity' and 'domesticity,' three important signatures of the novelization of the 18th-century British culture. First, Sylph as a counterpart of god in epic is presented in The Rape of the Lock just as a helpless, fictional and irrelevant thing that hardly affects the empirical world. It indicates how the mock-epic 'mocks' the classical world of 'epic' and stands closer to the world of the novel. Second, Pope's poem displays an accurate picture of the author's contemporary reality, a capital concern of the novel, such as imperialism, consumer society, commodity fetishism, or reification. Lastly, The Rape of the Lock lays out the construction of modern gender ideology, another quintessential interest of the novel, particularly with the fixed female image of a coquette. It efficiently silences and nullifies Belinda, a typical coquette, who stands as a threatening force to the ascendent domestic ideology.