Semiotics in Movie Posters: Fashion Matters

The purpose of this report is to examine four specific texts - consisting of movie advertisement posters for the film The Devil Wears Prada- using a semiotic lens. Semiotics is understood as follows:

Linguistic and Cultural Semiotics is a branch of communication theory that investigates sign systems and the modes of representation that humans use to convey feelings, thoughts, ideas, and ideologies. Semiotic analysis is rarely considered a field of study in its own right, but is used in a broad range of disciplines, including art, literature, anthropology, sociology, and the mass media. Semiotic analysis looks for the cultural and psychological patterns that underlie language, art and other cultural expressions. ....Whether used as a tool for representing phenomena or for interpreting it, the value of semiotic analysis becomes most pronounced in highly mediated, postmodern environments where encounters with manufactured reality shift our grounding senses of normalcy (Semiotics:

Language and culture, 2008, p. 1).

In the field of communications as an adjunct to cultural studies, the analytic lens thus provided allows one to recognize the divergence of signs and images within a cultural context. The four different film posters (attached as an appendix to this report) were designed to advertise the film in, respectively, France, the United States, Japan, and Hong Kong. Collected from an online keyword search of Google, these four p

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ionable items, balanced on high heel shoes, and positioned to be physically subordinate to the dominant Streep. The posters depicting the two women together are examples of what Thomas Mickey (1995) calls a deliberate "sociodrama," a set piece in which meaning is conveyed through positioning, clothing, facial expressions, and other elements of a visual text. The ideal identity created is one in which a woman is complete only through fashion, which promises beauty, acceptance, status, and even power. The images of the women and their clothing and accessories are essentially brands that suggest roles for women - with Streep as the empowered older woman in a professional position, and Hathaway as the ambitious, younger woman now immersed in Streep's fashion-conscious world. Mickey (1997) placed branding as a process of activities designed to create an identity in the context of French postmodernism as a variable construct of images devoid of objective reality, but functioning as a cultural artifact with political or economic reality for the individual in the culture. While all branding theories concern themselves with change and uncertainty, the postmodern theoretical perspective posits a moving equilibrium that engages

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