화장품 광고 모델로 본 스타문화사 연구

Abstract

Commercial advertisement has become a part of our everyday lives and is an crucial cultural practice that at once reflects and shapes our lives. Its basic function is to boost sales of a product, but it also creates a certain structure of meanings. Advertisement is a mirror to a certain era and a reproduction mechanism that shapes symbolic images of a subject. Cosmetics advertisement, among others, is especially keen to women’s aesthetics and thoughts, and it promptly reflects consumers’ needs and in that sense leads the whole living culture. At the heart of cosmetics commercials lies an advertisement model. Aesthetic sense of a certain era is embodied in the era’s ideal image of a woman. Analyzing images of advertisement models in view of cultural history, I intend to reveal the nature of superstar phenomena and how a superstar, in relations with a text and in a sociocultural context, produces and distributes meanings. The cultural historical approach to advertisement models is a project to analyze contemporary mass culture in view of the industry and spectatorship. In this paper I try to analyze representative cosmetics advertisement’ models of 1960s when western style cosmetics commercials were regularly introduced, of 1970s when modern cosmetics advertisement’ models began to take a certain pattern, and of 1980s when cosmetics advertisement modelling experienced substantial growth, and try to relate those superstar images to ideal image of women in respective periods. Hong Semi from late 1960s to early 1079s, Jeong Yunhui from mid-to-late 1970s to early 1980s, and Hwang Sinhye in mid-to-late 1980s are chosen here because they worked as cosmetics advertisement models under long-term and exclusive contracts. The transition of an ideal image of a woman from a traditional submissive image to a girly and sensual image to a modern and active image represents constantly changing social aspects and collective values. The advertisements try to appeal to consumers with stable images that are acceptable by contemporary social values and ideologies, but it also tends to over-project desires that are unfulfilled in reality.