(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
Abstract
There are over 30 different fashion magazines from Taiwan, Japan, Europe and
America in the market. The fashion magazine is a very important popular culture in
Taiwan, and it owns high readership. Through these multinational magazines, local
readers exposure in a global “beauty-scape”.
This study focus on how the readers interpret those local and international fashion
magazines, and try to catch their opinions about the content and aesthetic of
representation.
Depth-interview is used to be the research method, and finally collect the qualitative
data from 12 respondents, who are the main target of fashion magazines, age 22 to 33,
female, and live distribute whole areas of Taiwan. During the interviewing, they will
take their favorite magazines to assisted clarify their ideas. It’s helpful to reduce the
gap of the imagination from researcher and respondents.
This study finds some phenomenon worthy to note: First, local readers in Taiwan not
only give different assessments to the fashion magazines from Taiwan, Japan and
occident, but also adopt using those in different occasion. Second, the aesthetic of
representation in the fashion magazines and the traditional sense of beauty are
dissimilar, the former is more match with the concept of modernity, in other words,
the notion of modernity is taught through the fashion texts. Finally, the readers are not
fully controlled by the globalization power, they have reflexive thinking, but in the
practice, they are limited by structured social position so that they can’t do any real
term to resist it.
Keywords: audience research, fashion magazine, reception analysis, glocalization
Introduction
Globalization makes the world more and more homogeneous. Through the media and
new technology, people can share information and exchange their opinions
immediately, and the boundaries of geography seem disappeared. In another word, the
consequence of globalization reacts on not only entity, but also values. Globalization
as a power intensifies the culture of core countries. International culture industries
usually assumed to produce their product under a standardized process in order to
selling those goods extend to as many different countries as possible.
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