화장품 광고와 근대여성-­되기: 1930년대에서 1950년대까지

Abstract

Advertisements are the important tools to verify modern woman styles appeared in the 1920s and the 1930s all over the world. Specially, while cosmetics companies had continuously spreaded modern woman styles through printing media, cosmetics advertisements had positively reflected modern women in the days and created new desires of them by make-up faces, bobbed hair, exposed arms and legs, and the most up-to-date fashion styles. Since cosmetics advertisements had drowned modern women with new social recognition and the masses’ desires, we need to analyse very carefully them from the view of reflecting new woman’s image changed in the modern society. Cosmetics advertisements had started in the early days of the 1920s in Choseon during the Japanese occupation, and gone through the peak in the 1930s. The advertisements had displayed white women and Japanese women as the ideal standards of modern women, and represented Korean women based in vernacular modernity of Choseon. In the 1940s, the war regime had run, almost printing media were ceased to be publish, and the cosmetics market and advertisements were completely shirked. Instead, war slogans had occupied. In the 1950s when capitalism and Americanized democracy were mixed, Korea people were interested in consumerism, mass culture, and individualism and freedom then ever before. Since the cosmetics industry had experienced the boom with the recovery of mass culture including cinema, film stars were stared to sign for playing as the models for cosmetics advertisements. The mixture of star image and product brand image is important meaning in view of combining of entertainment and consumerism because it means that a film audience became a consumer. Advertisement is a mirror of the time, and reproduction mechanism of culture ideology that forms symbolic image of the subject. Also, advertisement is an ideology institute that represents masses’ reflection, desires and symbolic functions compositively, while keeps secure the social order and values. Therefore, this paper explores representation of women portrayed in cosmetics advertisements in colonial Choseon during the Japanese occupation and the postwar period; examines how masses’ diverse desires were included in the social system of the day; explains how becoming Korean modern woman were presented through women’s bodies of the cosmetics advertisements.