Images of older people in Chinese fashion magazines: a visual assemblage analysis

Abstract

This study analyzes and interprets the depicted older characters in the featured photographs in Chinese fashion magazines, namely, Harper’s Bazaar China and FHM China, to extend the research context and enrich the literature on the mediated images of older people. The concept of assemblage and the tetravalent model of assemblages developed by Deleuze and Guattari are adopted as the major theoretical framework and methodology. The study reveals that the fashion pictures as assemblages are territorialised by the coinciding binary lines of young/old and fashionable/unfashionable. The assemblages of older bodies depicted in the pictures are fixed by the attributes of rural origin, lower class, and fashion insensitivity and the discourses of ‘the elderly in empty nests’ and ‘the Chinese Dama.’ The older bodies act to destabilise the fashion pictures due to their heterogeneity with fashion. They reterritorialize the young female models as intruders to their ghetto territories. However, the models, who are empowered by their majoritarian roles, the otherness machine, and the fashion Orientalism, finally legitimate their intrusion and reterritorialize the older bodies as ‘bodies without layers.’ The elderly men’s conventional power as an active gazer is deterritorialised by the young female models.