• Journal of the Korean Society of Costume
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• v.57 no.10
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• pp.112-128
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• 2007

As fantasy films in which super heroes with superhuman abilities play an active part are rapidly becoming more popular, super hero stories are taking root as a new genre in fantasy films. The costumes in films play an important role in visualizing the virtual reality of fantasy films when those costumes are worn by characters so as to express and define them. In the meantime, in the antagonistic structure of good versus evil as a typical subject in these films, it may be said that the costumes of super heroes who advocate good and those of villains who represent evil have been created as an image of power. In this sense, it is necessary to establish an analytic system of how images of the power of good and evil are visually created in costumes for fantasy films. As such, this study seeks to analyze costumes in fantasy films more systemically through semiotic, which has taken root as a science of analysis in all areas of science. From the perspectives of aesthetic semiotic developed by Morris and costume aesthetics, the syntactical dimension is analyzed into formative elements and the principles of costumes; factual and expressive meanings, themes, and inherent meaning, all of which are immanent in costumes, are elicited in the semantic dimension; and the influence of costumes on viewers is described as identification in terms of pragmatics. This study provided a system to analyze costumes in fantasy films(especially 'Superman', 'Batman' and 'Spiderman') from the perspective of Morris' semiotic, and based on the analytic system, examined how 'power' is revealed in the costumes of super heroes and ruffians, and what it implies.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Costume
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• v.59 no.3
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• pp.14-26
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• 2009

This study is to investigate makeup shown in fashion collections of Christian Dior based on semiotical theory of Morris. Morris's theory developed from semiotics of Peirce composed of syntactics, semantics and pragmatics. Therefore, in the case of analysis of fashion makeup, syntactics investigates signs of forms, colors, textures and materials of makeup, semantics finds out meanings of the signs of syntactics and pragmatics analyzes aesthetic characteristics which the signs of syntactics and the meanings of semantics symbolize. Fashion makeup in Christian Dior Collections were expressed experimentalism sign, multi-culture sign and popularity sign. Experimentalism signs were expressed with graphic makeup and cyber techno makeup and multi-culture signs were done with ethnic make up and retro makeup. In addition, goth make up and hitch makeup showed popularity signs. This study found that the three types of signs were considered to reflect aesthetics of the contemporary fashion. Also, this study could conclude that fashion makeup was able to be interpreted by Morris' semiotics.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.12 no.6
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• pp.170-181
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• 2012

The study on the analytical and productive methodolgy of visual culture contents is meaningful because cultural contents are regarded as a national growth industry. The fundamental notion of cultural contents is researched based on the notion of visual culture, and important factors of the fun are analyzed as a creative motive of visual culture contents. So this paper provides anaytical methodologies for the fun in visual culture contents, which are based on semiotic theories of Charles Morris, Roland Barthes and Roman Jakobson. These analytical matrix can be references for the study of the mechanism of fun and the basic theory for using fun effects in the visual culture contents.