What message are those fashion magazine pictures sending to us? And who are those photos for?
Those photos are created and sent to those who are looking for them. And they (the creators) hope that it is basically everybody. The simple assumption here is that everybody likes beauty. We can say that those models are idealized ourselves, and they are living with our idealized lifestyles. But when they create those pictures, they are guessing the customers, what they like and what they want.
After think through the process of analysis, understanding, or maybe sometimes just guessing, it is all about “relationship” to me. Those pictures, objects or models, one or in a group, are trying to reach their potential customers by interpreting our relationships with nature, other people and objects, our position in everyday life and career, social status. The audiences looking for those pictures, those products are also trying to put themselves into a specific social position. It leads me to think back to “what is culture” again when I cannot get rid of this relationship concept.
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You have anticipated a phenomenological argument here. The question has to do with beauty, but since we don’t have access to beauty in-itself, you immediately defer its definition to a historical group (“ourselves”). Then it becomes the job of the advertiser to “guess” what we think beauty is, that is, to guess our intersubjective lifeworld, inasmuch as it relates to beauty and fashion. But of course, the advertisers aren’t trying to learn this to publish CHI papers, but rather to sell us stuff. And that works by projecting their own images of beauty into our lifeworlds, in the hope of altering our lifeworlds sufficiently to motivate us to desire their products.
Thus, the advertiser wants to find ways to discover our lifeworlds, but she or he also wants to change our lifeworlds in some way. In some sense, you can say all design is like this (though not necessarily merely for corporate profit, as seems to be the case with these fashion ads).
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The previous comment got nailed by the spam filter! You’d think that a comment (on phenomenology!) posted by the site administrator while logged in would not be marked as spam.
Obviously, obviously! the spam filter is a structuralist.