Communicating seduction. Luxury fashion advertisements in video campaigns

This study examines the different themes of communication that take place in video ad campaigns deriving from the French luxury fashion houses Louis Vuitton, Dior, Chanel, Cartier and Hermès. By using semiology as a method we were able to recognize the themes of adventure, seduction, love and play in the videos. This study explores also how the myth becomes an important meaning-maker of the luxury commodity and fills it with sensations and pleasure. Unlike all other ads, we could see that the meaning of luxury in the Hermès’ ones was not directly connected to the objects per se but to the experience of human senses in contact with nature. We could further conclude that the visual communication of the ads has no need to be logical as long as it can seduce with its positive signs. The object of luxury constitutes a strong communication tool helping the viewer to discover new places, to fall in love, to create magic and to experience the amusement of play. Embedded in recognizable social narratives, the objects in the moving image are provided with a seductive meaning able to support the eternal myth of luxury

The Mediation of Luxury Brands in Digital Storytelling

This paper considers the mediation of luxury fashion brands in the digital storytelling of the social media account named The Rich Kids of Instagram. Since 2012, Instagram users have been encouraged to use the hashtag #rkoi so photos of a lavish lifestyle can be collected together. The conspicuous consumption of these affluent young people from different countries also became Channel 4’s six-episode reality TV show Rich Kids of Instagram. The Instagram accounts and the TV show displaying well-known luxury fashion pieces, splendid cars and private jets are the object of this study. The motivation for this investigation comes from the need to reevaluate the idea of luxury and its dissemination in contemporary digital media. As is frequently exposed in social media, and in this particular case on Instagram, we aim to examine the outcome of this display. We intend to argue that the represented world on Instagram and the subsequent TV show distorts the expected or the lived experience of luxury as something distinctive and unique, and turns it into a kitsch object. Drawing on Baudrillard’s approach to mass-media culture (1998), we view kitsch as a category that is not to be confused with the real object (in this respect, the luxury one), but understood as a “pseudo-object” that represents an “aesthetics of simulation” of the original

Heike Jenss (ed.), Fashion Studies. Research Methods, Sites and Practices, London, Bloomsbury, 2016.

La mode, « cette [c]outûme, la manière de vivre, de faire les choses » comme Antoine Furetière l’a si bien décrite déjà en 1684, reste toujours un chantier à découvrir. Depuis bientôt trois décennies dans le paysage anglo-saxon, une discipline s’est forgée progressivement, pour le plus grand intérêt des chercheurs et des étudiants. Faisant d’abord partie d’autres disciplines universitaires, les études de mode, ou Fashion Studies, sont devenues non seulement indépendantes mais aussi abondantes..