Ricerc@Sapienza

The international studies on gender and advertising date back to the early Seventies and cut across various disciplines, such as sociology (Goffman 1976), mass communications (Busby 1975), feminist theory (Barthel 1988), critical theory (Williamson 1978), and marketing (Courtney and Lockeretz 1971, Wagner and Banos 1973, Belkaoui and Belkaoui 1976). Despite some interesting exceptions (Alreck, Settle and Belch 1982, Gentry, Doering, and O'Brien 1978), these studies mainly focus on sexual-stereotype, female representations and role portrayals.

Numerous studies (Bourdieu, 1979; Edgell, Hetherington, Warde, 1996; Kirkham, 1996; Ames, Martinez, 1996; Dholakia, 1999; Commuri, Gentry, 2000; Gunter, Furnham, 1998) indicate that purchasing decisions and consumption practices help to express (and generate) masculinity and femininity. As one of the most visible forms of consumption, clothing performs a major role in the social construction of gender identity (Crane, 2000).

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