Magazines: Mirror Images or Fantasies?

            

(sources: huffingtonpost.com, woosterandprince.com)

I am learning a lot about the business of magazines in this semester's Creative Communications program.  The most successful magazines are geared towards specific target audiences.  These magazines appeal to target audiences through story content and visual devices.

Depending on the target market you're in, there will be a certain magazine that is your ideal world.  You will have your own definition of what is cool.  If you're reading Wired, you will want to consume all that is technologically superior.  If you're reading GQ, you will want to dress to impress.  If you're a high-schooler who reads Sports Illustrated, you will want to emulate all that is mighty about your most admired athletes.

This brings me to my main question: do people read magazines because they see mirror images of what they are? Or do they read them because they see a life they wish to live or an icon they wish to be?

GQ wouldn't be around today if it didn't identify what its target audiences wore.  But there is another reason why it succeeds.  It shows images of the ideal and the new.  To me, it's plausible to say that people read magazines for both affirmation and discovery -- affirmation of the lifestyles they already live, discovery of the lives they wish to live.  You buy the magazine because either the celebrity is wearing what you are wearing or you want to wear what the celebrity is wearing or eat what the celebrity is cooking.

Culture does not really change on its own terms; the media bears major influence.  If there is a major cultural shift, it's because we don't look what we see in the mirror anymore.  We grow tired of ourselves and want to don new identities.  Thus, the magazine has a message: you can embrace your identity or destroy it.

The magazine also lets you know when to don a new identity.  When everyone emulates the new and unforeseen  the allure is gone, and the sense of individuality is lost.  The same institutions (magazines) that push these images of the 'new' and the 'cool' will then reject them and start from anew.

Some eventually realize all of this and wonder what is cool.  If the cat's out of the bag, out pops the age-old question of whether or not the facade of cool will endear.  And if you try to define things like 'hip and 'cool' down to the level of atoms, you will go bezerk at trying to find the answer because a culture in flux always redefines what is cool.