Advertsation: the Fashion Body and Its Impact On the Individual

Introduction

Clothing commercials have been influential tools in consumerism socialization for the longest time. And from glossy pages of fashion magazines to bright TV commercials and hundreds of hot fashion campaigns on the Web, fashion brands have never been shy to employ creative ad techniques to draw the audience’s attention. This constant bombardment of fashion advertisements has not only dictated what people wear, how they feel about themselves and their bodies, their status, and dreams.

In this article, we will look into a broad array of effects and importance of fashion advertising and promotion. Because there are multiple ways these advertisements alter perception of beauty and success, affect consumer behavior, and change societal norms, we will explore them as follows. Also, it will be determined how fashion advertising has adapted to change over the years, especially due to advance in media technology, and the consequences to the fashion consumer.

This is a discussion of the evolution of fashion advertising.

It can therefore be said that fashion advertising has undergone a longtime progress. While the fashion marketing in the early part of the 20th century used black and white images in newspapers and catalogs. In middle of the twentieth century with the coming of color prints and Television became a platform showing the fashion house latest products through models, celebrities through store windows inviting people to feel the desire to possess those products being advertised.

The 1980s and 1990s had relatively massive campaign propositions. Televised fashion advertisements featured beautiful people like Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford and Kate Moss and fashion advertisements were regarded as spectaculars. Rather than just selling apparels, these campaigns sold dreams, dreams of affluence, dreams of being on an upper echelon. Some cases like a Calvin Klein provocative images or Versace’s luxurious images broke the mold as to how fashion was sold.

The new century has brought Fashion advertising through the various social platforms such as face book, instagram, and tik tok. Fashion companies currently engage a lot of influencer marketing where social media personalities use their names and platforms to sell fashion products in their sponsor’s behalf. They make these advertisements less structured but more effective because they are real, and influencers communicate with fans in the first person.

Visual appeal as a Communicator for Fashion Market Advertising

There is nothing as powerful as visibility and that is why fashion advertising appeals to the audience by being highly visual. As a highly aesthetic business, advertisements create calls for attention and aim at focusing on the most attractive features of the item being marketed. Consumers often associate fashion advertisements with flawless makeup, perfectly lit models and awesome surroundings and they offer them a fantasy world they want to belong to.

It’s not about the product assertion; it’s about generating certain feelings. When consumer see a beautiful image of a model wearing a designer dress, that is not the dress that consumer is being attracted to. She added they are being sold beauty, confidence, and success. This emotional bond is one of the major motivators of consumer behavior since society always wants its members to look good, acceptable as per the standards defined by society and as successful as possible.

In fashion advertising, visual cues do not always refer to the given piece of clothing only, but rather it is much wider. Muscles, colors, and lighting all work together to help deliver what advertisers call a specific message. For example, low light levels may be exploited to create a more classy environment, while warm, daylight like light levels will be associated with joy and liberty. Likewise where a model positions herself can portray dominance or helplessness or regal depending on what the ‘brand image’ the firm wants to portray.

Impact on the Self Perception and Beauty Milestone

Perhaps one of the most pointed complaints about fashion advertising is the effect that they produce on the aesthetic sense of society. Since the beginning of advertising, fashion ads in particular have supplied minorities of skinny, tall and astonishingly beautiful models which only aggravated beauty standards. This has caused low self-esteem on the bodies of the consumers especially the young women who may feel compelled to achieve such impossible goals.

Research has proven that fashion advertisements have an ability to affect the self image of the receivers in a negative way and lead to eating disorders, depressions, and anxieties. People feel that they should look like the models depicted online or in magazines wearing flawless skin and ideal body figures, branded clothing, and accessories, or they feel that their worth is lower than that of the models.

Still, the pressure for change began more recently, and diverse advertising has started gaining popularity in fashion. Current and recent trends state that many brands such as Dove, Aerie, and Savage X Fenty are taking their time to use models of different sizes, color and age. Such shift towards inclusiveness has been applauded for encouraging the body positivity and encouraging the consumers to be happy with the change instead of having a skinny, Slender, or small shaped body.

The Psychological Effect of Fashion Advertising

Beyond dressing influence, fashion advertising has come to affect the thinking of people. For many years, one major way that this has been manifested is through the development of a "need" for fashion products. Advertising was a way to tap into the fears and desires of consumers, putting forth the argument that an item would make them more attractive or successful or happy. The psychological manipulation often plays with insecurities, particularly with how a person might look and his or her social status.

For example, a clothing advertisement might imply that a consumer purchasing its brand will be most popular or acceptable and well-liked by his peer groups. Again, it taps into the desire of being accepted within a society and belonging through which consumers would believe they need the product to fit in. On the same note, most advertisements associate luxury fashion brands with wealth and success, therefore creating aspiration. Consumers buy such things not necessarily because they need the thing, but to portray a more successful and richly profiled image.

Other ways in which fashion advertising may make a product more desirable are by offering limited-time offers, exclusive collections, or seasonal trends. This "fear of missing out" leads consumers to make impulsive purchases due to emotions rather than rational considerations. Fast fashion brands find means to produce collections faster than a whirlwind.

Social networking sites, growth and advancement of influencer marketplace.

This has shifted the balance of fashion advertisement that was once all placed through the air waves to social media. As Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest are some of the major sources of fashion content today, brands can thus directly communicate with consumers and more so in an exciting way. This is quite a deviation from the mostly passive advert forms seen dominating the current world.

The largest trend in fashion advertising may be influencer marketing, a kind of advertising where social media influencers, who similarly attract very large audiences, work with fashion brands to sell specific products. Influencers can be movie stars, ordinary people, everyone, but all of them have labored hard to cultivate their specific niche out of their personal fashion, qualities, or field.

Authenticity is what makes influencer marketing so successful: A majority of the consumer think that what the social media influencers they are following is advertising more than the actual advert. Products are usually posted often in the context of how the influencer integrates them into their everyday life. It makes an influencer help the audiences build a sort of confidence with their followers; this confidence will make followers have the best shot at giving the offer a shot.

Fashion Advertising and Culture Trends

Fashion advertising also has a part to play in the construction and revelation of culture. In the past few years, fashion advertisement has reflected social changes that exist on issues of gender, race and sexual orientation. For instance, going by fashion advertisements for the period, the 1960s female image was portrayed as rather more assertive than previous years. Likewise in the 21st Century, company advertisements are more liberal incorporating diversity because of the change in the actual definition of beauty.

Another way that fashion advertisements affect culture is through the advertisement’s ability to bring in new concepts and notions of beauty. For example, the trend of wearing sports accessories today can be linked to fashion commercials which made sportswear fashionable. Both Supreme and Off-White relied heavily on advertising to take streetwear from the margins, and make it a popular style.

But fashion advertising has section negative impacts in as far as it can reinforce negative stereotyping of women as mere sexual objects for consumption by men. Some current ads are still composed influenced by the stereotypic portrayal of women as sex symbols or portrayal of men as authoritative. Such representations can perpetuate negative social beliefs and perpetuate the oppression of particular minorities.

Conclusion

Fashion advertising is a powerful phenomenon which always affects people and their views on beauty, success, and status. Not only can it generate desire, mold the consumer base, and illustrate culture, its artistic capabilities, domestically driven sentimentality, and targeting techniques collectively make it so. But it is not without stock limitations as some of the changes it envisages require stocks to be present. The industry has for long been accused of setting unachievable standards of beauty that are bad for women and other stereotyping.

When it comes to fashion advertising, over the years as the market continues to transform especially by the incorporation of social media marketing and influencer marketing, these concerns have become well noted among the consumers. Companies are forcing brands to push down the doors of diversity, representation, and rightly-meaning marketing. In any case, a continuation of postmodern trends in fashion advertising is highly probable and this might well herald a change in the imagery and messages constructed around fashion, which would more accurately reflect the world today.

Consequently, fashion advertising remains an important tool, which not only keeps dictating what we wear, but also how we begin to perceive ourselves in the society.