“Shop it. Wear it. ‘Gram it.”: a qualitative textual analysis of women’s glossy fashion magazines and their intertextual relationship with Instagram

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article focuses on the intertextual relationship between women’s glossy fashion magazines and Instagram, questioning how magazines and their representations of femininity are shaped by their co-existence with Instagram. This study is based on a textual analysis of a theoretical sample of three monthly glossy magazines—Cosmopolitan, Glamour, and Vogue—collected between April and September 2017.These magazines have partially adopted, and adapted, social media logic, particularly the logic of quantified popularity, emphasising the large number of Instagram followers of the celebrities and Insta-famous users featured in the magazines. Furthermore, magazines have embraced several Instagram conventions, such as the use of hashtags, username handles or emojis, although using them in ways that are divorced from the original technological affordances. These magazines have also adopted seemingly feminist discourses, echoing the popularity of fourth-wave feminism. Yet these discourses co-exist with postfeminist sensibilities that focus on celebrating individual achievements and fashion as empowering, losing the focus on institutionalised inequalities.This paper seeks to understand the complex intertextual relationship between women’s magazines and Instagram, and its oscillation between contradictory, yet co-existing, discourses.