ABSTRACT
Since Roland Barthes’ pioneering work on the semiotics of fashion and the persuasive effect of “mythologies” in advertising,1 it is no longer possible to relegate “glamour” to the outskirts of social deliberation. Fashion magazines exert a powerful influence on community values; in more ways than one, fashion magazines do fashion perceptions of being together, of appearing to each other, and of reading others in society. Fashion magazines are immensely persuasive not only in selling goods and commodities, but in relaying perceptions and teaching readers at large how to behave. Like the “silent instructor” that the book became with the advent of the printing press during the Renaissance, these magazines behave like social teachers, intimating deliberative behaviors. In fragmented societies that can afford to support fashion print medias (examples of such societies are rare), these silent instructors operate toward social cohesion. Glossy magazines do tend to gloss over differences and to impart persuasively to their readership the sense that social divisions based on race, color, or ethnic background (which are by nature visually bound and therefore the very stuff of such medias) do not matter.
