“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.
