Saturday, May 25, 2019

Week9 Race and Beauty

Week9
ASA141
Xinyu Yang


The author of the article "Race and Beauty" describes the way Asian and Western models are portrayed in cross-cultural advertisements. In Asia, the clothing industry, especially underwear advertising, more choices of Western models.  Western models image more choose classic, feminine, emotional, independent and so on. Asian models are more likely to appear in advertisements for hair and skin beauty products. Most of the images are cute, youthful, etc. As far as personal experience is concerned, advertisements for Western models can be seen everywhere in Asian countries, especially for international brands such as Chanel, etc. Even though these brands have regional spokespersons in Asia, we still see advertisements for Western models in Asian malls. The author also mentioned, "theU.S. advertisements featured, as expected, Western models (99.0%) far more often than Asian models (1.0%)." This numerical gap is obvious.
Secondly, in the article, Western women are used as sexual objects in cross-cultural advertising, and Asian women generally do not present in this way. But in fact, I personally think that the “materialization” and “sex discrimination” of female images are still serious, not just in cross-cultural advertising.  This year (2019), a German-based retail company, Hornbach, posted a video ad on Twitter and YouTube with the theme "the smell of spring." In Asia, it caused dissatisfaction among women and Asians.

Are Western female models facing prejudice from Asia in advertising?

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