Fashionista's Bible: Elle Magazine

Photo Cred: Elle.com

Elle magazine is one of the world's largest fashion magazines that focuses on women's fashion, beauty, health, and entertainment. While there are plenty of articles based on women and fashion, the ratio of words to images is about 1:4. Elle focuses a majority of their attention on images: from top of the line designer ads such as Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Dior, Gucci, and Bottega Veneta to more consumer friendly ads such as K-Mart, Payless, and Target, there are pages of photoshoot spends on different and upcoming trends and styles of today, along with clippings of clothing from different runway shows to reveal the designer's newest trends.

Elle magazine effectively employs the use of the human brain to its entirety. The excess use of images makes the viewer/reader use their Limbic brain in order to process what they are seeing and then they are able to take in and understand the small print that goes along with each page.

Take the cover of the most recent edition of Elle magazine, the March 2011 edition. When I see the word Elle at the top of a magazine, instantly I fall in love, I may not want to mate to this magazine but I get this excited feeling inside of me where I can tell my Repiltian brain is intitially kicking in. Then my eyes go straight for Katy Perry, where I know have to use my Limbic brain in order to understand what I am looking at. I notice an image of a beautiful woman in warm lighting gently touching her lip. She seems to be dressed in clothing from the early 1900s. Finally, my Neocortecal brain gets put to use in order to read the headlines at the side of the page. Together, I use my Neocortex to understand the words the letters formulate but also the importance of certain words to others based on whether something is bold, bigger, or tighter together. Katy Perry is in bold near the bottom of the page and the next biggest print on the cover after Elle at the top. Now I understand who I am looking at. I read the rest of the headlines to understand what the rest of the magazine entails and now I am ready to delve into the fashionista's monthly bible.

Photo Cred: Coco Perez- Perez Hilton's Blog

Speaking of Katy Perry and her cover on the March 2011 edition, check out the exclusive video about her much anticipated photoshoot.



Elle magazine incorporates one of the most imporant media shirts: epistemological shift- the shift from word to image. Elle magazine doesn't focus as much on articles and words but on images in order to get their overall message across of women and fashion. They don't spend a lot of page space with words because I believe they found, as well as their avid readers, that the use of image is much stronger. It is always better to see an outfit or a trend than explain it. Therefore moving away from words and toward image


Due to Elle being based mainly on fashion, each viewer/reader that either flips through the magazine or attentively reads it, can develop their own individual meaning, one of the seven basic principles of media education. Based on the ads and photoshoots included in each edition, everyone can take away their own thoughts. Based on the image to the left, some readers could see the two women in this ad as just friends, such as myself, because I have grown to learn to not that fashion ads so seriously. While other readers who aren't as exposed to the inner workings of the fashion word, might perceive this image as two women who are more than friends because they are so close together and one has her arm around the other. This is a perfect example of a reader developing their own individual meaning based on the content within Elle magazine.

Photo Cred: Elle Magazine

Lastly, Elle employs persuasive technique of "beautiful people": persuading through images of good-looking individuals to sell products, lifestyles, behaviors, or ideas. Elle persuades its readers, who many of them are orginary people such as me and you, that they can be like celebrities and fashionistas of today's culture. Through their articles that focus on today's trends and list items you could possibily purchase in order to follow this trend, it makes the reader feel like there's a possibility to be like the people who can afford such clothes advertised and shown. It also gives the up and coming fashionista ideas of what to wear to follow the trends.

Elle magazine is a beautifully constructed fashion medium that focuses on today's world of clothes, accessories, and women. It encompasses the power tools that my class has been learning and utilizing to all types of mediums.