Stereotypes Faced By Fashion Magazines

Vogue. Cosmopolitan. Glamour. These high class fashion magazines have women drooling over makeup, clothing, and shoes that promise to transform their life. Magazines seem to attract the reader with phrases such as, “How to Look Hot Now” (see fig. 1), “Eat Your Way Thin” (see fig. 2), and “New body, New look, New life” (see fig. 3) in bold and colourful fonts. Headlines such as these seem to promise that a reader's flaws will easily be fixed by reading the advice within the magazine. With so many options, the choice of which fashion magazine to purchase is quite overwhelming and nearly impossible; almost as impossible as the perfection of the models' bodies plastered on each page. The models seem to be beckoning their fingers at the reader, …show more content…
For instance, children and adolescents are impressionable while exposed to magazines as they may find it difficult to distinguish between edited and original photographs (López-guimerà 388). Most of the readers of these magazines strive to look like the models within them because they are unaware of the processes involved in publishing a photograph in a magazine. After hours of preparing the model for a photoshoot, with the help of makeup artists, hairstylists, and fashion designers, a photographer situates the model into different poses in hopes of capturing the perfect shot. Hundreds of photos later, the photographer narrows the options down to his favourite poses, and begins to further fabricate the image through the use of an editing program such as Photoshop. For example, a photo of Faith Hill appears on the July cover of Redbook magazine (see fig. 4) that has been noticeably edited. The differences between the airbrushed cover photo and the original photo are extensive. Her facial wrinkles, protruding collarbone, and skin tone have been airbrushed to perfection; her arm, shoulder, and back have been manipulated to appear thinner; and her body, along with the dress she is wearing, has been condensed as well. The undeniable issue with photo manipulation is that the beauty ideal is being pushed further …show more content…
It may seem that just being exposed to these magazines would cause an individual to use extreme measures to lose weight, however, research proves that the reader must engage with what they are viewing and compare themselves to the images in a negative way (50). In other words, girls who idolize the photographs they see of models and celebrities in magazines are more likely to develop an eating disorder (Ibid.). An eating disorder is defined as “severe disturbances in eating behaviours, unhealthy efforts to control body fat and weight, as well as abnormal and unrealistic attitudes about one's own body weight and shape” (Donatelle 169). An eating disorder may not be easy to recognize as individuals can vary in body shape and size, weight, and overall appearance of health. Two eating disorders common to excessive media exposure and body comparison within individuals are anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. Both eating disorders share a common desire to be skinny and a fear of gaining weight, but use very different tactics to achieve results. Someone with anorexia nervosa will obsessively control their eating and may count and restrict calories, exercise compulsively, deny feelings of hunger, and refuse to eat in the presence of peers (169). This disorder may also cause an individual to shed large amounts of hair from their head and gain a