The visual construction of gender roles in advertising for ‘gender-neutral’ and ‘gender-specific’ fashion products A semiotic comparative analysis of adverts published in Dutch women’s lifestyle magazines between 2015 and 2018

The topic of this thesis concerns two contrasting marketing strategies that are presented by marketing reports as growing trends, which are ‘gender-specific products’ and ‘gender-neutral products’. Existing literature highlights that these trends are closely related to specific gender representations, but the existing academic literature lacks empirical research on how these gender representations are practically visualized in advertising for gender-neutral and genderspecific products. Therefore, this thesis investigates gender role portrayals in advertising for these two types of products. More specifically, as gender-related marketing trends such as ‘gender blurring’ are especially present in the fashion industry, the research of this thesis focuses on fashion advertising. As a result, this thesis answers the central research question ‘How did fashion brands portray gender roles in advertisements for ‘gender-neutral’ and ‘gender-specific’ products in Dutch women’s lifestyle magazines between 2015 and 2018?’. After collecting 100 fashion adverts from multiple Dutch women’s lifestyle magazines that were published between 2015 and 2018, a qualitative research method that consisted of a semiotic analysis was carried out. During this analysis, several aspects from academic theories about multimodal meaning-making were used to be able to analyze power relationships between men and women in advertising. After structuring the results, the first finding was that only a small amount of fashion advertisements promoted gender-neutral products. Secondly, the research indicated that most adverts include non-traditional gender roles by portraying men and women as equal or by showing women as more dominant than men. However, when it comes to the visual appearance of the models, fashion brands mainly seem to include models that have a look which conforms with stereotypical masculinity or stereotypical femininity, which goes against the trend of gender blurring and gender-neutral marketing. Moreover, the research indicated that the changing conceptualization of ‘gender’ in society as well as the presence of ambiguous themes in fashion advertising ask for a revision of academic theories on the visual analysis of gender roles within contemporary (fashion) advertising.