Beauty and the Beast

Many of us  look at a beautiful face on an advertisement and wonder if the outward beauty is reflected through beautiful deeds and words too.

Beauty and the Beast- A portrayal of Beauty with goodness and Ugliness as beastly

Beauty and the beast- are they both two sides of a coin in a person or is there a clear demarcation where one can safely say that a beautiful face on an advertisement also forms a beautiful positive image of that person in the mind's eye?

Thornhill and Grammer (1999)  has suggested that facial attractiveness in women is a deceptive signal of youth. Maybe, the reflection of artificial perfection in the multimedia is a way of attracting the consumer through unconscious awakening of their basic need for portraying themself as youthful and wanted. Yet, it could create a bad body image for the consumer who covets the perfection for herself/himself. Also, when weighing the psychological factors of perception of humans according to Grogan ( pp.9 2008) , the outside appearance of body is seen as symbol of personal order or disorder. This symbolic acceptance is advertised with the help of misleading advertisements that are made to look perfect with the help of airbrushing softwares. The consumer buys into this misconception of positive characterisation and not the actual person hidden behind the perfect image portrayed with the help of cosmetics and design softwares.

Makeup makeover portraying ugly and beautiful side of the same face before and after makeup

 We grow envious everyday of the  perfect media created beauty portrayed in the magazines and multimedia. We want all the beauty in this world to be reflected in the media's justification of what is defined as acceptable.

Before and After of a Makeover Picture

The imperfect-side is portrayed as ugly and perfect side of a fashion model is portrayed as stunningly gorgeous. Media is stereotypes acceptable and unacceptable beauty,  but perhaps there  is a mid-ground where one must notice the beauty inside a blemish portrayed as the modern beast in the adverts, and where everyone has flaws and are not airbrushed to perfection. 

Men of 21st cenury and their body image

Perception of the attractiveness of the male body has changed over times for students and also male population in general. There was a time when big wigs and a thin body image wearing fabulously fashionable clothes were called dandy in the 18th century and were looked upon as the trendy male role models.

Dandy -lean male body image of the 18th and 19th century

Young Jason Mamoa with his boyish look

Older Jason Mamoa with a fierce muscled look for his character of Khal Drogo in 'Game of Thrones'.

In the 21st century, the likes of Jason mamoa and the A & F male models with their steroid muscles are seen to be the perfect alpha male. These role models have made men of today hit the gym with a vengeance and resort to artificial means of getting the image of a mucled model of today's times. According to Blouin and Goldfield (2006) steroid users reported that the most significant reason for using steroids was to improve looks and also reported that building muscles also helped elevate their need for  perfectionism  and lower self-esteem.  The results from Blouin and Goldfield( 2006) also suggest that male bodybuilders among the youth are at risk for body image disturbance and the associated psychological characteristics that have been commonly reported among eating disorder patients. Is there a cure for such perception of beauty is a topic much debated over in the media. Maybe if  the role models became lean themself that would change the perceptions, but would these muscled stars ever change their looks is very doubtful.

The Celebrity Fashion Professor

Alexander McQueen, Hussein Chalayan and Mary Katrantzou- they all have a commonality of not just being the famous players of fashion but also was taught by the same professor from Central Saint martin (CSM), Louise Wilson.

Louisa Wilson : Source: Telegraph

Few professors impact our lives with their support, advice, their 'Rock star' persona, their guidance or kindness. Today we pay a tribute to a celebrity professor who shot to fame because most of her students are Fashion celebrities and are employed successfully in the fashion industry. 

She came into the media limelight for this phenomenal factor of producing talented super designers into the world of fashion. Her contribution to teaching got recognised by an OBE award ceremony organised by her ex-students and staff from CSM in 2008. They also presented her with a book with a page from each of her famous alumni, also considered a trophy in itself.

Nilson (2010) has commented that effective motivational techniques and effective teaching techniques greatly overlap. Also, more motivated students want to learn more, so they achieve more. How Louise Wilson has motivated successful Fashion students can only be addressed by interviewing her students. But, among all other reasons of networking, and the backing of a university, the prime reason for a star student to have succeeded to excel in a profession that they had chosen to study in university remains evidence to the motivation given by the professor to the student to excel and achieve more as stated by Nilson (2010).

Fashionable students on Television soaps!

The 21st century student stars portrayed in the TV series are very fashionable with designer garbs. The theme of gossip also seems to have made reality TV shows and teen TV series quite popular among the youth.

Gossip girl, the TV soap has inspired designer Anna Sui to come up with an entire collection after the characters in it. This popularity is because of the social interaction and bonding over the subject of fashion and gossip by the student groups. Every girl who goes to university would  indulge in elaborate critical arguments with friends on their favourite or the worst outfit worn by Blair or Jenny from 'gossip girl' and share the latest gossip about what has happened between the characters in the series.

The mixture of 'Gossip' and 'Fashion' has made the series popular with fan following trying to copy their favourite look and adopting the values showcased on the series of 'gossiping'. According to Thornborrow and Morris (2004) gossip is a strategy used by both men and women to build themselves a positive identity within their social group and with the viewing public. Thornborrow and Morris (2004) have also posited the central role of gossip talk in establishing social values and maintaining social relations. The TV series draws on this to make the viewer have interaction with the TV characters as a third party listening in on gossip shared by the actors and actresses in the series.

original characters of Gossip girl versus the inspired collection of Anna Sui. Source: glamlist.com

RGU has caught up on this new trend of fashionable students with its very own fashion photography session in the 'The bulletin' weekly in association with Fashion Society UNI-Fashion and the fashion management students posing with their styled creations and also catching the fashionistas from other streams caught on camera in campus..

Fabindia- The Ethical Retailer from India

 According to Keller (1998), brand is a set of mental associations held by the consumer which adds to the perceived value of a product or service resulting in brand image. Fabindia is an ethical Indian retail brand founded in 1960 by John Bissell, an American who had come to India on a Ford Foundation Grant to advise the government about how to create market for the hand-looms of rural India (Vogue 2012).

Fabindia started with exporting the Indian hand-looms to retailers worldwide. Fabindia was a supplier of handmade textiles, wholesaling the produce of local weavers to retailers worldwide and served as middlemen to the hand-loom weavers of India. The brand ventured into retailing its products in Indian market in 1975. Fabindia works on a Community Owned Company model (COC). From the day of its inception it has catered to social entrepreneurship and is a for-profit company working with cooperative units, and small business units (SBU) who are the shareholders of the brand. Fabindia offers its Retail stores in various International places including UAE, Dubai, Bahrain, Italy and Rome.

Sisterhood, sexuality and the space of the benign in makeover TV

The perfect relationship or the perfect body is only heard of in fairy-tales. To work around what you have, and that little bump here and there- that’s what makes for a beautiful relationship with your partner and yourself, starting with your 'body'. In ‘How to look good naked’, Gok wan does not mock or belittle the imperfections of the female body, instead he tries to make women confident of their body and forms a synthetic sisterhood as discussed in C’mon Girlfriend (Frith et al 2010). This synthetic friendship between a straight woman and homosexual man is critically analysed by Annus (2011) , who proposes that the gay experts on the show capitalize on traditional stereotypical traits of femininity assigned to women and gays in contemporary western societies. In the HLGN Gok wan is this traditional stereotype  best-friend because of his suspended sexuality .

This new trend of benign makeover TV shows relates to the everyday woman.  Unlike the shows ‘Queer eyes’ or ‘What not to wear’,  Gok wan tries to make the woman form a friendly camaraderie with her body. Gok wan’s show has changed the trend of woman aspiring for the perfect stereotype model body. In the paperback ‘Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity’, Weber (2010)  contends that the makeover television show is a complicated text from which we can learn much about cultural desires and fears as expressed through narratives of selfhood.

Weber (2010) also argues that although makeovers are directed at both male and female viewers, their gendered logic requires that feminized subjects submit to the controlling expertise wielded by authorities. Although Gow wan’s show is classified as benign, it still wields stereotypical yielding of woman participants to the authority on fashion, in this case the authority is Gok wan.

Visual identity and image of Manish Arora

Manish Arora Logo, Symbol and visual identity
www.manisharora.ws

Paco Rabanne has got a new Creative Director Manish Arora who hails from India and is an alumni of NIFT, the prestigious design school in India. The verbal Identity of Manish Arora gives the consumer the impression that the Country of Origin is India. His brand name has Indianised english  fonts, Kitsch style and psychedelic colours synonymous with the country's colourful lifestyle. This distinct style of the design brand has formed the visuall identity for the brand.

The brand has taken the personality of the designer with brand name linguistic characteristics (Keller 2008) of semantic devices such as Paronomasia (Keller 2008) which refers to pun and word plays clearly illustrated in Manish Arora’s label called Fish fry which has had collaborations with Reebok, MAC and Swatch.

Personification which is humanising an inanimate object as discussed by Keller (2008) is shown in the main brand name 'Manish Arora' which also has a strong visual identity with its logo, in which orthographic device of abbreviation (Keller 2008) 'MA' is used with bright pink and lime green colours that are very memorable hence adhering to memorability, likeability and adaptability of the brand (Keller 2008). Also, since the brand name is a person and the logo is distinct the brand name is protected.

The brand positioning achieves differentiation from the category as a whole rather than from specific competitors within the category referring to disruptive positioning approach as stated by Keller (2008). This approach is achieved because it defies its own category of fashion, borrow rules from another category- Architecture, Sculpture and Paintings; and create a new category of Revolutionary clothing. The target market of Manish Arora or Paco Rabanne is celebrities who have defied rules such as Lady Gaga, Katy perry and Rihanna.