An apparent freedom. Micromachismo in the resexualization of female bodies in italian fashion advertising

The paper regards women portrayals in the Italian fashion advertising and aims to record a possible evolution in gender images since the Seventies, assuming the presence of different stereotypes, less blatant than in the past. The study is about female portrayals in Vogue Italia’s advertisements from 1964 to 2013, with a content-analysis on 1356 ads and 1933 models. The coding scheme used for this analysis was based on the one developed by sociologist Erving Goffman in the 1970s. The study reveals that women images in the Italian fashion advertising are still quite traditional and only a slight decrease in the stereotypical depiction of women is found over time. Moreover, the woman promoted today by the Italian fashion advertising spreads ambivalent messages related to “femininity”: she is depicted as a self-asserting and self-confident “subject”, but her main power is to seduce. The seduction takes place mainly through her body, which she has to maintain “forever” young and attractive (through the products advertised in magazines). The body is the main, if not the only, means to enhance women, and the ideology of beauty blends inextricably with instances of emancipation. The difference with the image of the “woman-object” of the 1970s is that the performance of an eroticized body is presented as a choice, a form of power, which can lead to improving women’s “value” in the emotional, occupational or political “market”. Thus, women’s progress in gaining social power has been counteracted by disempowering them in visually subtle ways.