Ricerc@Sapienza

The paper regards women portrayals in the Italian fashion advertising and aims to
record a possible evolution in gender images since the Seventies, assuming the presence of
different stereotypes, less blatant than in the past. The study is about female portrayals in
Vogue Italia’s advertisements from 1964 to 2013, with a content-analysis on 1356 ads and
1933 models. The coding scheme used for this analysis was based on the one developed by
sociologist Erving Goffman in the 1970s. The study reveals that women images in the Italian

The paper regards the advertising practice as it relates to gender. In order to appreciate the commercial “culture of production” (du Gay, 1997), we studied the production processes that lead to particular gender representations. In fact, in spite of persistent criticisms of advertising’s treatment of gender (Kilbourne, 1999), few authors have focused their attention on the production process behind the gendered messages (Tuncay Zayer & Coleman, 2014).

Deforming Mirrors and Optical Illusions. Gendered Advertisements in the Practitioners’ Reading. The relationship between gender and advertising is a classic object of socio- communicative research (Goffman 1977), investigated more in content than in public or production. Many articles have focused on sexual stereotyping (Barthel 1988; Belkaoui, Belkaoui 1976; Furnham, Bitar 1993; Furnham, Schofield 1986; Furnham, Voli 1989; García-Muñoz et. al. 1994; Livingstone, Green 1986; Gilly 1988; McArthur, Resko 1975; Mazzella et. al.