Abstract
Fashion luxury products, which used to mean high-quality, handcrafted not-so-trendy items, are nowadays regarded as expensive fashion merchandise produced under the name of imported well-known brands. People cunsuming fashion luxury products distinguish themselves from other people according to the luxury fashion brands they are using, and as a result, advertisements of fashion luxury products are taken as a kind of international language. The purpose of this study is to point out the socio-cultural meanings of consuming fashion luxury products, by analyzing images shown in advertisements of fashion luxury products focusing on women's images. To do so, this study is based on general theoretical background on fashion, consumer culture advertising and analysis advertisements of fashion luxury products shown in fashion magazines in recent three years. The result of this study is as follows; The images of the advertisements of fashion luxury products could be categorized as (1) elegance, (2) kitsch and (3) fetish. Elegance is a taste of high society, aesthetically chic and feminine. Fashion luxury products, which are merchandise of extravagance, dignity, refinement, feminity and harmony, exhibit high-quality grace through their advertisements. Kitsch represents the vulgar and popular images of trivial commodities of industrial society. In the advertisement of fashion luxury product, it is shown as inappropriateness, excessiveness, stereotyped pleasantness, exaggeration an playful satisfaction. Finally, fetish images represent erotic or perverted sexuality, based on psychoanalytic fetishism which objects are regarded s substitute of sexual orgasm. The advertisements of fashion luxury product are characterized as (1) popularization of luxury, (2) objectification of sex and body, and (3) re-aestetification of anti-aesthetics. The asvertisements of fashion luxury products are actually targeted to the middle class with successful career women's images. They objectify female bodies through fetishistic images. Also, the deviant subcultural style, represented a new kind of cultural capital, is now reproduced as a new commodity aesthetics.