What is the relationship between the body image and the self-esteem of young woman and the fashion ads nowadays? MYRTEL CATSHOEK 1622581 CONCEPT DESIGN MARVIN FERNANDES
Introduction The perfect body has been an issue since I can remember. Beauty is always a pressure in the society and even if you don t want to be involved, you ll get involved. Perfection seems to be the striven of every woman and becomes with some of them one of the first priorities in life. Fashion brands show advertisements with models with size zero and on the runway; there are girls who are around the age of 15. The last one has been disclaimed since a few years, I thought. Although, how does this affects to the women in our society? The average body size of a woman is 12, only in the United States the average size is 14. The average size in the fashion industry is size 6 or 8. For me, this was a reason to research. What makes a woman confident these days? The media makes us insecure about our bodies, but this doesn t have to be. With this research I want to show how many reasons a woman has to feel beautiful instead of watching the models on the billboards in the city or the mannequins in the shopping malls. This research will be developed by several research questions, but mostly the opinion of the women themselves. I want to show them how to be comfortable with themselves and how to be confident in a world full of fake beauty. 2
Index INTRODUCTION GOAL RESEARCH QUESTION AND SUBQUESTIONS WHAT MAKES A WOMAN CONFIDENT? WHAT KINDS OF ADVERTISEMENTS ARE IN THE FASHION INDUSTRY? WHAT ARE CONTROVERSIAL ADS IN THE MEDIA NOWADAYS? HOW DOES ADVERTISING AFFECT THE SOCIAL CONFIDENCE OF PEOPLE? CONCLUSION SOURCES ATTACHEMENTS 2 4 5 6 9 12 15 18 19 20 3
Goal With this seminar I would like to see what kind of influence advertisements have at the confidence of women. I hope this will get some answers that I wouldn t except at first. Also, I would like people to show what influence advertisements have on the feelings of women and how it could destroy being normal human being. This subject interests me a lot because if I could find out the real reason and how this problem could be solved, it may be able to be inspiring for others. There could be some CMD students who will be in the scene of fashion brands and have to make advertisements for them. Also, there are so many advertisements with the standard of perfect people, why are they always using good looking and perfect people in advertisements. For this seminar, to not get too broad, I will focus on the fashion advertisements but it would definitely be inspiring for all the CMD students who will be in the advertising. I hope I will make some things clear that are really bothering me now and I hope that it will get you thinking about your next advertisement. 4
Research question and subquestions My research question is the following question: What is the relationship between the body image and the self-esteem of young woman and the fashion ads nowadays? In this research I would like to answer this question within quite research and a well-founded conclusion. This research question will be answered with different sub questions. These are the sub questions: What makes woman confident? What kinds of advertisements are in the fashion industry? What are controversial ads in the media nowadays? How does advertising affect the social confidence of people? 5
What makes a woman confident? The first question is about the confidence of a woman. The confidence of a woman is hard to describe because no one is the same, so not everyone is confident about the same things. To get in this question, I first did some desk research about the confidence of women. First, I found a book about body image. In this book, I found much information that was useful for my research. The confidence of women is mostly lower by the fact that there is an ideal beauty and body. This image of perfection shows women how to be and how not to be. The picture of being perfect is mostly combined with slimness and the body of a Barbie doll. It started all very early when women were wearing corsets to get the body they always wanted. Now, in the twentieth century, women are doing diets and plastic surgery to get the current ideal. In 1985, Paul Rozin and April Fallon did a research with 227 women. They asked them to choose from a rating scale with nine different women body types which one fits the most with the theses they asked. They asked for the women their ideal body, their current body and the body men would find the most attractive. The results were that most women chose a more thick body for the current body, a real thin body for ideal body and a body between those for what men would find the most attractive. Rozin and Fallon concluded that the pursuit of thinness is motivated by self-imposed pressure to be thin rather than the desire to be attractive to men. Grogan, S., 2008) Thinness is, especially in the Western culture, a real ideal beauty goal. Fashion advertisements, television campaigns, etcetera make an impression on girls of a young age. Being beautiful seems to be the first priority for women instead of living really like they would like to live. Some of them keep eating with diets and then get eating disorders. Confidence is mostly related to the pressure of being beautiful instead of the beauty that is inside you. 6
For this part, I did field research and a questionnaire. The questionnaire had over the 100 responses, so we are able to get some answers from this questionnaire. The questionnaire had a few questions, those questions were about what makes you feel confident about yourself, the decision of Beauty or Brains, a rating of their body and what was perfection according to them. Some of those answers were really useful for this research. I noticed that the men saw being confident was more about what you doing well instead of women. Every man said something he was confident about, this was different towards the women. The most women said they were confident when they wear nice clothes, their make up was good or their hair was pretty. Also they said about being loved by others and achieve things like getting a good grade. Otherwise, there were also some women who said they had nothing to be confident about. We also asked to rate their body. There were 18 people who gave themselves a negative rating; this means from 1 to 5, this is 17% of the respondents. The most popular rate of the rating was a 7, this is probably because it is the most average number from 5 to 10. From the 104 respondents 35% gave this rate to their body. Next to that there was the rate 8 with 24% of the respondents. These ratings show that most of the respondents are happy with their body or are positive about their body. Confidence is also related to the environment you re in. The way you act depends on what area you are at. Imagine, you live in a small town without any television, magazines, or whatever you could see the ideal body at. You are there with yourself and like 1000 others. No one has ever been away from this town so this is the only world you all know. The ideal body could be way different then in this world we live in now. Confidence starts when you are young and it really depends on where you live and how you are raised. It has to do with you behaviour and your personality, this all starts by growing 7
up. Personality also has to be with your confidence. When you don t come up for yourself and you are very shy, you have more chance to get bullied then others. These traumatic experiences will be followed up when you re older and show their disadvantages later when you are getting older. With the upcoming of social media, the pressure of being beautiful has grown even more. Research showed that only 1 out of 10 girls, between the age of 10-17 years, thinks she is beautiful. In the Netherlands, 72% of the girls is the most critical about herself. (De Telegraaf, 2012) I saw this documentary from Sunny Bergman about women who are getting older and don t feel confident about their body because of the current ideal body. I wasn t really focused on the documentary but then I heard Dr. Constatijn Bauland, a plastic surgeon, talking about what was a normal woman. He says that women want to be normal, not that pretty or beautiful but just normal. But what is normal, according to you? the woman asks, which the man replies There is kind of a length of what normal is. If your in this length, you know you are normal because of the people around you and the media and if you re not you know that too. (Beperkt Houdbaar, 20) This documentary shows a lot about how women feel when they are getting older and also really shows how much impact the media has on the confidence of the women. So, media influences women, but other women around them are also influencing them. Friends and just women on the streets, the beautiful pictures of your pretty aunt wearing a bikini in the Bahamas, it is all confronting your self-confidence. And what women are really confident about? First, it depends on who they are, what they do and how they act. Women are way too different but if you see this research, it seems they all have one thing in common: insecurity is normal. 8
What kinds of advertisements are in the fashion industry? In the world of advertising there is one that really stands out. The fashion industry has a big marketing and there is lots of competition in the small world of beauty and style. The fashion industry works with the fashion marketing; fashion marketing is based on fashion merchandising and cultural marketing. It combined the relationship of fashion designs and marketing. You have got several ways to promote your fashion brand or the clothes. There are many ways to promote your brand and get people to buy your fashion or cosmetic. I ve been looking through advertisements and there were some things that really stood out. LOOK AT ME, I M A CELEBRITY. A popular one is the one with the celebrities and the famous people. This ensures of authority and shows people like; Look how beautiful Beyoncé looks, would you like to be just as great she is. She is so pretty and successful, you really want to be like her don t you? Well, just do it! Buy it! It will make you as her. Of course, this is nonsense. Celebrities also have been photo shopped, just like all the other models in campaigns. Even, the authority of the celebrities ensures that the normal people are more in to buying the products the brands wants to sell. 9
SEX SELLS Also the ones with sexual tinted images are popular. Sex sells, is what some people say. If this is true is a question to think about. Research showed that sex in advertisements ensures that people will look but don t remember it that much. So, it ensures attention but it doesn t ensure that your ad will be remembered. Although, many fashion brands use sex in their campaigns, sometimes it goes that far that people are not sure if it s fashion or that it is more related to porn. Tom Ford s campaign for the first fragrance for man is very sexual. QUILL magazine says: The inclusion of nudity doesn t equal a crossover between fashion and porn. Many high fashion editorials feature exposed breasts but the women are posed in a powerful and confident stance. It is the addition of vulnerability and lack of dominance that can turn a fashion ad into a pornographic one. It s unfortunate that so many brands resort to sex appeal in such an extreme way and that we now accept this as normal. (QUILL magazine, 2014). At QUILL magazine they are sure about it: sex does sell. TELL A STORY In the fashion industry it is very popular to use couple of models in a certain way that they are in environment with others. Think of the ads from Tommy Hilfiger and Dolce & Gabbana. There are many people involved in the 10
campaign and they have mostly different settings (and different ads) with the same people and the same story. The storytelling in an advertisement is very important. If it is not just a simplistic photo without any story behind, it will be just about the product. The more expensive brands mostly build a story around their brand because it should be a thing to wear their clothes. They just want to build an environment around their brand, a feeling that shows how they are and the new collection for the new season. It is kind of like a fashion show, they show their clothes but some brands tell a story with the show and sometimes the whole environment of the show is more than just the clothes. Like the Victoria Secret show, they use for every show a theme and make a story with that theme. These three things really stood out for me. I found those in several campaigns and most of the campaigns had more than one of these three in their campaigns. Fashion brands are using famous people in a sexual or controversial way, telling a story about the brand and show what the brand wants to tell. Advertisements are really important in the fashion brand and if you want to approach to a certain target group you have to stand out and do something else than just sell clothes. 11
What are controversial ads in the media nowadays? In sub question 2 we saw that fashion advertisements are sometimes very shocking and could be controversial for some people. The past years, there has been lots of commotion about several campaigns. More and more people are aware of Photoshop and more brands are going to use those plus size models; models with a size 8 are now called plus size. I have been looking for some advertisements where has been commotion about or is controversial nowadays. I would like to start with a brand that most of the people know, it is not that shocking, and they just do things different. Dove is a brand that focuses on the normal women: women who are very skinny or just very curvy, women who do have imperfections and who aren t afraid to show them to the world. Dove makes her campaigns really realistic by using real women. Also, they try to let women believe that they are all beautiful. On the other hand, there is Victoria Secret. This lingerie brand has every year a big show with extraordinary beautiful models. Maybe someone has seen their new show? Anyway, they are also into the perfect body. Even then, they see this perfect body in a different way than Dove sees it. There has been lots of commotion about the campaign of Victoria Secret. The campaign showed several pretty models who were very skinny and tall with 12
the slogan: The perfect body. Victoria Secret got lots of disagreements at their campaign and changed the slogan to The perfect body. The body was about the underwear itself but that didn t turn out well either. Dove played it very well, they responded on the campaign with their own campaign: The Perfect Real Body. Also Calvin Klein got commotion on their plus size model from a few months ago. Model Myla Dalbesio has an US size 10, what is too big for a normal model but too small for a plus size model, what starts with size 12. Calvin Klein saw potency in her and booked her for their new advertisement. The ad was for an underwear campaign and had the tagline Perfectly Fit. After the launch of the campaign, Twitter exploded of comments. Many people were mad at Calvin Klein by using a plus size model who is, for most of us, just a normal size and has a slim body. The fact that she was called a plus size model was for some people disgusting and unbelievable. Although, it wasn t Calvin Klein intention to use a plus size model to get attention and show the world that they hired a plus size model, they just thought she was beautiful in the way she is. Calvin Klein just used her for her normal beauty, something lots of people have been asking for. 13
More brands and magazines are trying to get more plus size models involved with their work. In 2011 the Italian Vogue got a cover with three plus size models posing beautifully in lingerie. The editor-in-chief from Vogue Italia, Franca Sozzani says: We help plus-size women dress fashionably. We say: It s pointless for you to buy leggings, take this because this will look good on you. We help them choose. We don t talk about diets because they don t want to be on a diet, but it s not a ghetto. Why should these women slim down? Many of the women who have a few extra kilos are especially beautiful and also more feminine. (The Huffington Post, 2011) I am now only focussing on the advertisements that have been controversial because of the models and the sizes. There are way more advertisements that are controversial because of too much naked or sexual tinted images. Because of all the advertisements I have just chosen those to make clear what the fashion industry is doing now at their advertisements. 14
How does advertising affect the social confidence of people? The pressure of being skinny, tall and beautiful has been for long while the part of most of the women their lives. Linda Smolak (2004) notes that the models in the year 2000 are thinner than 98 per cent of the US women. Also now, the average body size of a woman is 12, only in the United States the average size is 14. The average size in the fashion industry is size 6 or 8. The media has lots of effects to the body image of people. Several experts did researches to this topic. For example, Philip Myers and Frank Biocca (1992) did a fascinating study about women and how media affects young women their body image. They discovered there are two different stages of building a distorted body image. In the first stage women feel bonded with the models, you feel like your body looks like the pretty model body. After that, you realise something. Your body looks awful next to those models. After I read so many articles it seems right that the ideal body was mostly slender and tall. Slenderness is in the Western mostly associated with happiness, success, youthfulness and social acceptability. Susan Bordo (2003) wrote the book Unbearable Weight that is about women and their bodies in the Western culture. The body has been seen as a symbol for a personal order or a personal disorder. Susan says that makes people think that the excess flesh on a body has to do with low morality, reflecting personal inadequacy or a lack of will. The slender body is a symbol of someone who is in control. People who don t have this body feel like they have to work on it to get the ideal body. Bordo also says: if you are not blessed with a great slender body, you have to work on it and deal with your body. Like Beyoncé and Jennifer Lopez, they have curves but they work on it. So that makes it acceptable. Being confident is hard these times and it is a great if you re confident but like everyone got something they 15
are not satisfied with. In the book Body Image (Grogan, S., 2008) they say that magazines have an enormous influence on particularly young women. In the United Kingdom over the half of the British population reads fashion magazines. It is obvious that the media affects the confidence of the woman. I found three theories that explain how media images might affect the body image. SOCIAL COMPARISON THEORY Leon Festinger founds this theory in 1954. This theory shows how we use comparison in our life related to magazines and other media images that affects you. The theory says that we determine on our own social skills and personal worth. Then, we compare ourselves with others and get a negative self-esteem. Even when you don t feel intimidated by some beautiful models, it may could be seen as inspirational images and comparison targets for self-improvement. SELF-SCHEMA THEORY According to Markus, founder of this theory in 1977: People develop their sense of self through reflecting on their own behaviours, from observing reactions of others to the self, and through processing social information about which aspects of the self are most valued. Body image can become a central defining feature of the self-concept for some people, meaning that they become extremely sensitive to additional incoming information about weight, shape and size. SELF-DISCREPANCY THEORY The theory is focussed on the emotional reaction caused by the lack of match between a person s actual self and what are known as self-guides. The self-discrepancy theory is based on the source of anxiety and dejection of individuals. Higgins, founder of the theory in 1987, proposes that a discrepancy between the actual and ideal 16
selves leads to discomfort and body dissatisfaction. This all shows how much influence the media has on people. The theories show how you could recognize confidence that has been affected by media. 17
Conclusion We can conclude that the research question is quite solved. Women get affected by the media because of their lower self-esteem that starts when they are younger, in a couple of years their confidence get even lower because of what they see in the media. Even when the media would use plus size models, it will be helpful for the girls who are getting a eating disorder but not really for those who are insecure. I think that insecurity is based on what we see on others and how we compare ourselves with others. The Self Comparison Theory is a theory that really inspired me, the way they looked at the base of the insecurity of women was really inspirational for me. For me, media is just a sideshow of how women get insecure. The most important part of how people get insecure is because of the comparison with other people. Looking at their success and skills, people make targets for themselves but forgot to be an individual and think about your own skills and what your achievements are. That is what really important for me is. 18
Sources AD. (2011) PLUS-SIZE MODELLEN OP COVER ITALIAANSE VOGUE http://www.ad.nl/ad/nl/1003/you/article/detail/2440983/2011/06/03/plus-size-modellen-opcover-italiaanse-vogue.dhtml BERGMAN, S. (2007) BEPERKT HOUDBAAR http://www.beperkthoudbaar.info/docu/ GROGAN, S. (2008) BODY IMAGE http://www.tandfebooks.com/doi/view/10.4324/9780203004340 LOCKWOOD, L. (2014) FASHION ADVERTISING: CONTROVERSY WHERE HAS IT GONE? http://www.wwd.com/media-news/media-features/controversy-where-has-it-gone- 7813542?full=true MOSS, H. (2011) VOGUE ITALIA PUTS THREE PLUS-SIZE MODELS ON JUNE COVER http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/03/vogue-italia-plus-size_n_870739.html MOSS, S. (2009) SELF DISCREPANCY THEORY http://www.psych-it.com.au/psychlopedia/article.asp?id=336 SHARKEY, L. (2014) FASHION OR PORN: WHAT S THE DIFFERENCE? http://quillmagazine.co.uk/fashion-or-porn/ SWASH, R. (2014) CALVIN KLEIN ADS FEATURING PLUS SIZE MODEL MYLA DALBESIO IGNITE ONLINE DEBATE http://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2014/nov/11/-sp-myla-dalbesio-calvin-kleins-newmodel-size-10-plus-size TELEGRAAF. (2012) ZELFBEELD MEISJES ERG SLECHT http://www.telegraaf.nl/vrouw/relatie/21043164/ Zelfbeeld_jonge_meisjes_erg_slecht. html 19
Attachements Here you can find a link to the answers of the questionnaire. QUESTIONNAIRE 20