What

“Vogue is a fashion and lifestyle magazine published in 17 countries” (Wikipedia). Vogue publishes a magazine addressing topics of fashion, life and design each month. Our project is a visualization that is based on Vogue’s magazine covers collected from different countries.  What has resulted is an image that shows many significant changes since the beginning of the magazine’s publications up to now in various regions. By comparing the covers of each published magazine and from each country, we are able to see a range of diversity between the magazine’s publication dates as well as cultural differences during that time. From this, we are also able to see what changes Vogue Magazine has gone through and what it has become today. 

Why  

Fashion plays an important role in our lives. It does not just only represent different life styles, but also different cultures and their interests. Vogue magazines are known as the epitome of fashion of all countries and fashion trends are usually inter-related to culture. Since Vogue publishes writings on “art, culture, politics, and ideas” (Wikipedia), the magazine must present a cover which appeals to its contemporary and regionally-specified audience. The members of the project were inspired by Lev Manovich’s Time Magazines Visualization (http://lab.softwarestudies.com/). However, unlike Time Magazine which has been published solely in United States, Vogue has been published in 17 different countries: Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, Greece, India, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Taiwan, United Kingdom, and United States. The models, fashion, composition, color, and settings presented in the covers are significant to each country to appeal to its audience during different time periods and in different regions. With different countries, years, fashion, and culture, we saw the potential of finding interesting visualizations. Throughout time, these magazine covers also changed from country to country, showing the cultural changes in trends from interest to popularity.

How

For this project, we collected Vogue magazine covers manually from scans that other people have uploaded onto a public site (http://www.whosdatedwho.com/what/magazine_view.asp?ID=232&year=1930). Covers were also collected from the official Vogue website itself (http://www.vogue.co.uk/magazine/archive/default.aspx). Each image file was manually pulled as data and renamed by hand to organize them by Country, Month, and Year. By renaming the files accordingly, we were then able to categorize the data by Country, Month and Year in Excel. Primarily using ImageJ to create visualizations, we faced the challenge of finding an effective way to present all significant, cultural changes in Vogue from different times and places. We had also experimented with many other tools such as Flash and Mondrian. However, we decided that ImageJ was the best program to effectively portray all cultural significances of Vogue magazine by cover. After gathering and renaming the images, we organized them as data in excel where the x-axis represented the month that a certain magazine was published in, and the y-axis represented the year. This data was then used in an ImageJ “Image-Plot” macro provided by Lev Manovich, which created a visual graph. On each x and y axis, an image of the corresponding cover is placed on a point in the graph. Other techniques and programs such as Adobe Photoshop were then used to refine the visualizations, which produced the final product.