Feminist Media Studies

ISSN: 1468-0777 (Print) 1471-5902 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfms20

“Shop it. Wear it. ‘Gram it.”: a qualitative textual

analysis of women’s glossy fashion magazines and
their intertextual relationship with Instagram

Sofia P. Caldeira

To cite this article: Sofia P. Caldeira (2018): “Shop it. Wear it. ‘Gram it.”: a qualitative textual
analysis of women’s glossy fashion magazines and their intertextual relationship with Instagram,
Feminist Media Studies, DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2018.1548498

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2018.1548498

Published online: 04 Dec 2018.

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FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2018.1548498

“Shop it. Wear it. ‘Gram it.”: a qualitative textual analysis of

women’s glossy fashion magazines and their intertextual
relationship with Instagram
Sofia P. Caldeira
Department of Communication Sciences, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This article focuses on the intertextual relationship between women’s Received 15 January 2018
glossy fashion magazines and Instagram, questioning how magazines Revised 8 November 2018
and their representations of femininity are shaped by their Accepted 12 November 2018
co-existence with Instagram. This study is based on a textual analysis KEYWORDS
of a theoretical sample of three monthly glossy magazines— Women’s magazines;
Cosmopolitan, Glamour, and Vogue—collected between April and Instagram; femininity;
September 2017. intertextuality; social media
These magazines have partially adopted, and adapted, social logic
media logic, particularly the logic of quantified popularity, empha-
sising the large number of Instagram followers of the celebrities
and Insta-famous users featured in the magazines. Furthermore,
magazines have embraced several Instagram conventions, such as
the use of hashtags, username handles or emojis, although using
them in ways that are divorced from the original technological
affordances. These magazines have also adopted seemingly fem-
inist discourses, echoing the popularity of fourth-wave feminism.
Yet these discourses co-exist with postfeminist sensibilities that
focus on celebrating individual achievements and fashion as
empowering, losing the focus on institutionalised inequalities.
This paper seeks to understand the complex intertextual relation-
ship between women’s magazines and Instagram, and its oscillation
between contradictory, yet co-existing, discourses.

Introduction
In recent years there has been a decline in the sales of women’s glossy fashion magazines,
partly due to the growth of digital media (McKinsey & Company 2015). Nevertheless, these
magazines remain a popular media format (Rosalind Gill 2007, 180). According to the
magazines’ media kits (yearly information packages for prospective advertisers introducing
the magazines, their reach, and their audience profiles), these publications still maintain
large circulation and readership numbers, averaging nearly one million readers annually
(Cosmopolitan 2016; Glamour 2017a; Vogue 2017a). As such, women’s magazines remain
a large presence in our contemporary cultural arena, playing an important role in the
construction of idealised notions of femininity in western visual culture (Sherrie Inness

CONTACT Sofia P. Caldeira anasofia.pereiracaldeira@ugent.be Department of Communication Sciences, Ghent

University, Korte Meer 7-11, Ghent 9000, Belgium
© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 S. P. CALDEIRA

2004, 124–125). Women’s glossy fashion magazines, such as Cosmopolitan, Glamour or

Vogue1, can be understood as circulating narratives of femininity—sets of conventions
and values that create an, often unachievable, ideal of femininity, through fashion, beauty,
and lifestyle advice (Lisa Duke and Peggy Kreshel 1998, 48).
This research focuses on the United Kingdom editions of the aforementioned maga-
zines. As such the representations of femininity presented in these magazines are largely
shaped by western beauty ideals, created in anglophone or European contexts (Yan Yan
and Kim Bissell 2014, 209). These western-centric beauty ideals, embodied by many of
the represented models, present a narrow and exclusionary version of normative fem-
ininity and beauty, often limited to young, thin, predominantly white, able-bodied,
seemingly heterosexual, and conventionally attractive women (Gill 2007), privileging
Caucasian-looking features such as small noses and large eyes (Giselinde Kuipers, Yiu
Fai Chow, and Elise van der Laan 2014, 2171).
These exclusionary beauty ideals are circulated transnationally, as these magazines
have international relevance in the fashion and media worlds (Kuipers, Chow, and van
der Laan 2014, 2159). Previous research into transnational women’s magazines explores
the ways western media and ideals permeate different cultural contexts (Kuipers, Chow,
and van der Laan 2014; Michelle Nelson and Hye-Jin Paek 2005; L. Ayu Saraswati 2010;
Yan and Bissell 2014).
All the magazines under analysis have multiple international editions, functioning in
a franchise-like system, combining local content production with centralised branded
standards (Saraswati 2010, 22). Local editions follow carefully controlled shared editorial
guidelines, branding strategies, and sometimes even publish shared content (Nelson
and Paek 2005). For example, articles published in UK editions (e.g., Cosmopolitan
August 2017d, 172–178; Cosmopolitan October 2017f, 102–104) can later reappear in
other international editions, often with only minor layout changes—with the original
text largely un-edited, and recognising the authorship of the UK staffers (e.g.,
Cosmopolitan South-Africa February 2018, 102–104; 172–178). By adopting these cen-
tralised guidelines, these international editions also heavily feature anglophone and
European models and celebrities, in often larger numbers than local models, further
disseminating westernised beauty ideals (Yan and Bissell 2014, 201).
Furthermore, these UK-based editions have also international circulation, disseminat-
ing these ideals of femininity on a wider transnational scale (Yan and Bissell 2014, 195).
However, women’s fashion magazines now share the media environment with digital
and social media platforms. Amongst those, Instagram has become particularly popular
and integrated into our contemporary cultural experience, reaching already over
800 million active monthly users (Instagram Press 2017). This growing popularity is
reflected in women’s magazines. As such it becomes important to study the multiple
ways in which these two media are related. This article questions how women’s glossy
magazines, their representations of femininity, and underlying gender politics are
shaped by their co-existence with Instagram, and how they incorporate some of the
conventions of social media into their printed format.
This notion of relationality and interconnectedness brings to the fore the concept of
intertextuality, understood as the manner in which a text is constructed in relation to
already existing texts and discourses, reflecting contemporary “cultural texts” (Graham
Allen 2006). The co-existence of social media platforms, like Instagram, with women’s
 FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 3

glossy magazines can thus lead to a mutually re-shaping of both in an intertextual

relationship. Furthermore, as this relationship occurs across different media platforms,
drawing on the reader’s tacit knowledge of their diverse conventions to create a more
layered text, it also draws on the notion of transmedia (Henry Jenkins 2006). This
intertextual relationship is bi-directional, with social media adopting some of the dis-
courses of popular culture (Sander De Ridder 2014, 87–88), and mainstream media
outlets, like fashion magazines, simultaneously adopting the emerging discourses and
conventions of social media (Tonny Krijnen and Sofie Van Bauwel 2015, 119).
The intertextual relationship of women’s magazines with Instagram goes beyond
direct and explicit allusions to the social media platform. It relies on the use of implicitly
recognizable conventions and language in order to position itself as part of, or adjacent
to, the social media world that it refers to (Charles Bazerman 2004, 87–89). By adopting
some of the conventions of Instagram and emphasising the idea of an Instagrammable
aesthetic, magazines embrace social media logic (José Van Dijck and Thomas Poell 2013),
as will be further developed in the article.
In order to study how women’s fashion magazines and their representations of
femininity are shaped by Instagram, this article follows a feminist media studies per-
spective, drawing from previous research on women’s magazines (e.g., Ros Ballaster,
et al. 1993; Duke and Kreshel 1998; Ellen McCracken 1993; Yan and Bissell 2014). This
research follows a qualitative approach, based on a constructivist textual analysis
(Thomas R. Lindlof and Bryan C. Taylor 2011) which critically interprets a theoretical
sample of three monthly women’s glossy magazines—Cosmopolitan, Glamour, and
Vogue. These magazines were selected because they were the top three read women’s
magazines (excluding housekeeping and cooking magazines) in the United Kingdom in
2015 (National Readership Survey 2015).
The magazines were collected over six consecutive months, between April and
September 2017, totalling 18 issues. Only editorial content was analysed, excluding
advertisements and openly marked advertorials. The analysis focused on articles con-
taining photographic representations of women, analysing both images and textual
context, comprising over 1800 pages and 2700 images in total.
A coding frame was constructed according to constructivist grounded theory (Robert
Thornberg and Kathy Charmaz 2014). A set of categories and respective codes was
created by combining insights from a previous literature review (focusing on questions
of media representation, gender and femininity, women’s magazines, social media and
its relationship with preceding media formats, and feminist scholarship) with insights
that emerged from the familiarisation with the data.
Following a close reading, the magazines were coded, labelling each pre-established
category of the text with a particular code. For each image were coded the models’
characteristics (such as type of model, perceived gender, race, body type and unconven-
tional beauty markers), photographs’ formal characteristics (colour, framing, scale, use of
digital enhancement), styling characteristics (stance in pose, facial expression, make-up
and clothing), as well as the stereotypical character of feminine representation and the
sexualisation of the represented women’s bodies. On the text was coded the type of
article, its intertextual relationship to Instagram and social media, political framing,
judgements of physical appearance, and discourses of beautification and body improve-
ment. Although both images and text were analysed, this article mainly focuses on the
4 S. P. CALDEIRA

discourses shared in women’s magazines. A detailed comparative analysis between the

photographic representations of magazines and Instagram, however, is beyond the
scope of this article.
The data were later critically interpreted, using connecting strategies to make links
amongst codes, categorising and interpreting these codes and categories into broader
themes and concepts, and writing analytic memos with emerging reflections and ques-
tions (Joseph Maxwell and Margaret Chmiel 2014). The analysis was also confronted with
the existing literature, in order to create an interplay between the data, the emerging
interpretations and the concepts and debates from prior work in the field.

The printed magazine as the centre of a broader multi-media universe

In Vogue’s September issue, in her final editor’s letter after 25 years as editor-in-chief of
Vogue UK, Alexandra Shulman recognised that nowadays editing Vogue is more than just
editing the printed magazine; it includes guiding the production of Vogue’s website and
overseeing the digital content of its multiple social media platforms, including Instagram
(Vogue September 2017e, 81–83).
As digital and social media became an integral part of our culture, women’s maga-
zines were forced to confront the challenges brought by digitisation and to innovate
accordingly. Women’s magazines had to reconfigure themselves, shifting their identity
from being centred in a physical object—the printed issue—into a broader concept of
brand, which can be expressed through multiple platforms (Brooke Erin Duffy 2013). This
was reflected in the magazines’ adoption of a creative combination between print and
digital media in order to better engage with readers, as Glamour (2017a) states in its
media kit. By adopting digital and social media platforms magazines allude to a sense of
interactivity and community, framing the readers as part of the magazine’s “brand” and
taking their input as feedback and sometimes even as content (Duffy 2013).
Magazines now exist as transmedial brands (Jenkins 2006), conceiving themselves as
a broader multi-media universe, where digital and social media platforms orbit around
the central printed magazine (Glamour 2017a; Vogue 2017a). Magazines’ media kits no
longer solely emphasise their large readership numbers but also highlight the number of
followers on their social media platforms, including Instagram (Cosmopolitan 2016;
Glamour 2017a; Vogue 2017a).
Both Glamour and Vogue have in their printed issues recurring sections dedicated to
promoting their various social media channels. Digital content seeps into the magazines
as they share what’s happening on their social media in printed format, and urge readers
to join their online following, in order to gain exclusive “behind the scenes” access
(Vogue June 2017b, 54).
Furthermore, all the analysed issues make frequent, if often passing, allusions to social
media and Instagram in particular, treating it as a naturalised and integral part of
everyday life. Mentions to Instagram feeds, famous influencers, or Instagrammable
aesthetic goals abound in all the studied magazines, not only in sections specifically
dedicated to social media but in all kinds of articles throughout the magazine.
There are, of course, differences in the ways the particular magazines engage with
Instagram. While Cosmopolitan, for example, has no recurring section on its digital
platforms, it nonetheless makes, as does Glamour, extremely frequent allusions to
 FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 5

Instagram in prominent positions, such as the cover or content pages. These magazines,
according to their media kits, address a younger “millennial” audience of smartphone
users (Cosmopolitan 2016; Glamour 2017a). As such, they frequently refer to Instagram
conventions, using hashtags, username handles and even emojis in their articles, and
sometimes even publishing content taken from Instagram.
On the other hand, Vogue (2017a) seeks to address a slightly older, more affluent
audience of “luxury consumers.” This seems to be reflected in its less overt approach to
Instagram. None of the studied issues of Vogue had direct allusions to Instagram on its
covers, nor did they publish any content specifically marked as being taken from
Instagram. Yet, all the analysed issues of Vogue still made clear and somewhat regular
references to Instagram and its conventions, although to a lesser extent than
Cosmopolitan or Glamour. This discrepancy is noticeable in the coming analysis, where
examples from Vogue feature less frequently.

Adopting social media logic

Social media’s quick expansion into the realm of everyday life has shaped its surround-
ing media environment (Van Dijck and Poell 2013, 2–3). Social media logic—the norms,
strategies and mechanisms that determine its dynamics—has been placed into an
intertextual dialogue with the pre-existing mass media formats, affecting the ways in
which women’s magazines are constructed (Van Dijck and Poell 2013, 2). Instagram’s
conventions and aesthetics refashion not only the representations of femininity present
in women’s magazines but also their discourses and underlying gender politics.
This already familiar logic of social media can be transported in a seemingly “natural”
way into this different mediated context (Van Dijck and Poell 2013, 5). Instagram and the
broader idea of an Instagrammable aesthetic is effortlessly brought into the text of the
analysed magazines, being offhandedly referred to in many diverse guises, as for
example an indispensable entertainment for downtimes (Cosmopolitan October 2017f,
11) or as a portrait of one’s life (Glamour October 2017g, 77–80). The use of Instagram is
taken as common knowledge, to such an extent that the idea of someone not knowing
what Instagram is is framed as a motive for mockery (Glamour September 2017f, 40–47).
The extent of this relationship becomes especially noticeable in Glamour’s August
special issue, completely devoted to Instagram and framed as a celebration of “the
app that changed the world” (Glamour August 2017e).
A particular logic of social media that the studied women’s magazines seem to
have widely adopted and reinterpreted is the logic of quantified popularity (Van Dijck
and Poell 2013). This logic fits particularly well into the discourses of women’s
magazines because it draws from the pre-existing mass media logic and its cult of
celebrity. “Traditional” media celebrities, like musicians or actors, depend on their
ability to be “likeable” and attract the audiences’ attention in order to achieve their
celebrity status (Van Dijck and Poell 2013, 6). Similarly, social media platforms like
Instagram, with its highly visible quantified metrics of popularity—such as the num-
ber of followers and “likes”—can encourage people to actively seek to increase their
audiences and achieve the status of Instagram microcelebrity, or as Alice Marwick
(2015) puts it, Insta-fame.
6 S. P. CALDEIRA

The traditional mass media logic of celebrity and the quantified logic of popularity of
social media complement and enhance each other. Traditional celebrity is reinforced by
being “liked” and followed on social media. The most popular accounts on Instagram
belong largely to “traditional” celebrities, famous for their work in the entertainment and
fashion industries (Marwick 2015, 146). Conversely, popular Insta-famous users also
become incorporated into the mass media cult of celebrity, being featured in women’s
magazines alongside traditional celebrities (Van Dijck and Poell 2013, 7).
The studied magazines have widely accepted and integrated the logic of quantified
popularity, brandishing Instagram metrics, such as “likes” and following numbers, as
legitimate, and legitimising, standards of success (Van Dijck and Poell 2013, 7). Not only
do they emphasise on both the magazines themselves and on their yearly media kits
(Cosmopolitan 2016; Glamour 2017a; Vogue 2017a) their own large social media follow-
ing, they also extend the same logic to the featured celebrities, influencers, brands and
events alike.
Celebrities, particularly those featured as cover models, and Insta-famous users, such
as fashion and beauty influencers, are routinely presented on Cosmopolitan and Glamour
(and to a lesser extent also on Vogue) by emphasising their Instagram popularity and
millions of followers, as further proof of their celebrity statutes (e.g., Cosmopolitan
June 2017b, 30–38; Glamour August 2017e, 128–137; Vogue June 2017b, 164–172).
Furthermore, the success of fashion events or trends also becomes measured by their
ability to generate “buzz” on Instagram, with magazines euphemistically referring, for
example, to a pair of boots at a runway show as “almost breaking Instagram” (Glamour
August 2017e, 21).
As this social media logic does not necessarily follow geographical delimitations, it
has a potentially transnational character (Van Dijck and Poell 2013, 8). When adopted by
women’s magazines, this can occasionally be translated in a broadening of the scope of
celebrities and Insta-celebrities featured in the publications, representing women from
outside the UK, where the studied magazines are produced. The August issue of
Glamour, for example, presents amongst its must-follow Instagram list an array of
Instagram feeds of influencers, artists, and online activists, from countries as diverse as
New Zealand, Brazil, Japan or The Philippines (Glamour August 2017e, 56–59). Later in
the same issue, the Emirati beauty expert Huda Kattan is presented as “the most
influential beauty blogger in the world”, emphasising her 20 million Instagram following
(Glamour August 2017e, 102–103).
Additionally, magazines further adopt social media logic by referring to an
Instagrammable aesthetic and making intertextual use of certain types of language
and conventions that can be implicitly recognised as evoking the world of Instagram
and social media. This adds a further layer of meaning to the magazines’ texts, relying on
readers’ prior knowledge (Bazerman 2004, 87), although often not to an extent where
the lack of knowledge about Instagram would impair the understanding of the
magazines.
In the analysed sample, the use of hashtags is particularly noticeable. Magazine
articles occasionally make purposeful references to hashtags that are actually present,
searchable and useful on Instagram—for example, the #clothesmyhusbandhates used by
Glamour’s editor Jo Elvin (Glamour October 2017g, 15). Most often, however, these
magazines use hashtags in ways that are completely detached from their Instagram
 FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 7

uses, functioning rather as aesthetic and stylistic allusions to social media that punctuate
articles otherwise completely unrelated to Instagram and its actual digital practices. For
example, articles about skin care regiments for the décolletage area are punctuated by
the humorous hashtag #takeittothetits (Vogue July 2017c, 162). Glamour has even
a recurring beauty section entitled #AskAlex, which, despite what the title might suggest,
is not calling on the participation of the readers and asking them to submit their beauty
questions on social media using the hashtag, but is rather unilaterally giving expert
beauty advice by the magazine’s beauty editor.
Instagram username handles are also frequently used by the studied magazines.
Articles on celebrities, fashion and beauty experts, or influencers, are often accompanied
by their username handles, identifying their social media accounts and directing readers
to their feeds. Occasionally celebrities’ names get omitted from the articles, and user-
names become the sole identifier of these celebrities. Not only those made famous
through their Instagram use (Marwick 2015), like influencers or Instagram-born brands,
are referred on magazines solely through their handles (Glamour October 2017g, 93–96;
Glamour June 2017c, 180–181). Established models, like Bella Hadid, are also featured by
mentioning only their Instagram handle, @bellahadid, as sufficient identification
(Glamour August 2017e, 99).
These Instagram hashtags and username handles are thus often used on these
women’s magazines in ways that are divorced from the original technological affordances
(Sonia Livingstone 2008; José Van Dijck 2013) of the social media platform. Detached
from the digital interface and transposed into a printed format, they no longer allow for
their intended technological capabilities—such as serving as hyperlinks for specific
users’ feeds on Instagram, as metadata for categorising and organising posts, or as
a way to join online conversations and communities. The potentially interactive char-
acter of social media and its call for reader’s active engagement is often neglected.
Rather, these magazines frequently allude to a broader sense of Instagrammable aes-
thetic, using these hashtags and handles as stylistic conventions or as ways to frame the
magazines as belonging to the same universe of Instagram.
The writing conventions of Instagram also seep into the articles of the magazines
under analysis. Emojis, although not widely used, have become part of the acceptable
expressive vocabulary, being used, for example, to express love for a certain brand: “We
♥ [heart emoji] Mango” (Glamour October 2017g, 168–169). Internet slang and abbrevia-
tions, commonly used on Instagram, become naturalised in these magazines, with
popular acronyms such as IRL (Cosmopolitan September 2017e, 5–7) or OOTD (Glamour
May 2017b, 5–10), being used as common knowledge, not needing “translation.”
In a more direct interrelation, the studied magazines occasionally published content
originally produced for Instagram. Glamour, for example, has a recurring section called
“We hear you” where it publishes “traditional” letters from readers alongside comments
made on social media, duly identified by the readers’ username handle and with all the
original hashtags and emojis.
Instagram photographs, with their particular square format and filter aesthetic, are
also occasionally published on these magazines. Sometimes such images belong to
“ordinary” people (i.e., not models or celebrities), illustrating articles about their personal
experiences and relationships (e.g., Glamour September 2017f, 40–47). More frequently,
though, these Instagram images belong to either conventionally attractive Insta-famous
8 S. P. CALDEIRA

users (Glamour August 2017e, 94–95), or to “traditional” media celebrities. Carefully

crafted and idealised images from celebrities Instagrams get republished in the maga-
zines’ articles (e.g., Cosmopolitan October 2017f, 90–94). As such, social media logic
becomes further enmeshed in the magazines existing cult of celebrity, mutually reinfor-
cing each other (Van Dijck and Poell 2013, 6).
The analysed women’s magazines also embrace the logic of Instagram by promoting
the idea of an Instagrammable aesthetic—a careful consideration of lifestyles and experi-
ences in terms of their visual and aesthetic characteristics, that deems certain items and
events as particularly photo-worthy and likely to attract likes on Instagram and, thus,
desirable. Magazines often emphasise this Instagrammable character as a means to
encourage readers to acquire certain fashion, beauty, and lifestyle goods. This echoes
a wider phenomenon, explored by Agnès Rocamora (2017), of taking social media into
account when designing and producing fashion, creating clothing to “photograph well”
and look good on Instagram.
The studied magazines frequently appeal to this idea of dressing for Instagram,
headlining covers and articles with sentences such as “Shop it. Wear it. ‘Gram it”
(Cosmopolitan September 2017e, emphasis added). Fashion articles praise clothing for
its Instagrammable aesthetic, and emphasise its photogenic qualities, ability to attract
likes and appeal to followers (Glamour August 2017e, 29).
Due to the transnational aspect of social media (Van Dijck and Poell 2013, 8), the
popularity of these fashion items is not geographically constrained. Instagram is praised
in these women’s magazines as redefining the geographies of fashion, lauded as
a discovery ground for emerging global trends and designers. Amongst its Insta-
worthy buys, Glamour promotes Greek sandals, Australian bikinis, and Bulgarian shoes,
emphasising their online popularity and explicitly linking it to their commercial success
(Glamour August 2017e, 18–19).
In the analysed magazines, travelling destinations get particularly emphasised for
their Insta-worthiness. Sharing holidays’ photos on Instagram is seen as a given, and, as
such, destinations are described in terms of their scenic character, and ability to allow for
an “Insta-brag” and generate likes (Cosmopolitan August 2017d, 172–178). Following
a circular logic, magazines not only advise the consumption of goods because they will
look good on Instagram, they also encourage to buy the things that have already been
featured and gained Instagram approval. Instagram is presented as a source of #trave-
linspo, with holiday destinations advertised based on their current popularity on the
platform, forgoing more practically driven concerns, such as pricing (Glamour
August 2017e, 158–159).
Occasionally, these magazines share tips and tricks for creating idealised Instagram
representations. These tips, perhaps inadvertently, make clear the constructed and
labour-intensive character of these representations. The “perfect selfie,” for example, is
presented as implying the taking of hundreds of photos in order to achieve a single
“good one,” the use of photo-editing apps to remove any blemishes, carefully controlled
posing strategies, and attentive lightning choices (Cosmopolitan July 2017c, 112–115).
Despite the ideas of immediacy and spontaneity sometimes associated with digital
photography and social media, these discourses make clear the highly idealised char-
acter that self-representation on Instagram can also have, employing photographic and
editing strategies that echo magazines’ own careful construction of images of femininity.
 FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 9

Furthermore, if the goal is to achieve Insta-fame and monetise on the use of

Instagram, those efforts are to be redoubled, implying strategic and time consuming
content creation, use of hashtags, networking and community creation via comments
and messaging, in order to establish a large following base—as the Cosmopolitan article
on “pet influencers” thoroughly explains (Cosmopolitan October 2017f, 126–131). For
“traditional” media celebrities, who already attract of lot of attention, the pressure to
maintain a flawless, consistent and carefully crafted social media image is so high, that
magazines acknowledge that they often need to hire highly skilled professionals to
manage their accounts, in order to avoid faux-pas (Cosmopolitan October 2017f, 90–94).
Despite the broad adoption of the conventions and logic of Instagram by the studied
women’s magazines, this does not mean, however, that these magazines maintain
exclusively positive views on Instagram. Women’s magazines have the ability to comfor-
tably hold contradictory discourses (Ballaster et al. 1993, 127), and, as such, the positive
celebration of Instagram can co-exist with markedly negative judgements on the social
media platform. These contradictions are highly noticeable in the studied sample. In
other articles praised, selfie-taking gets also portrayed as a vain and narcissistic endea-
vour of millennials (Vogue July 2017c, 134–137), echoing the broader popular media
disdain of the selfie phenomenon (Anne Burns 2015). The effort to achieve a higher
follower count can be re-framed by magazines as a stress source (Glamour
October 2017g, 125), and the labour of taking the perfect selfie as dishonest (Glamour
September 2017f, 154–155). While on some articles Insta-famous beauty bloggers are
treated as experts in their own right, on others their expertise is harshly questioned and
dismissed in favour of “traditional” specialists, like dermatologists (Cosmopolitan
May 2017a, 128–134).
These magazines are thus able to maintain sometimes extremely critical views on
Instagram and social media that co-exist side-by-side with their almost naturalised
adoption of social media logic.

#girlboss: women’s magazines embracing a popular feminist positioning

Alexandra Shulman’s final editor’s letter was intended as a celebration of her 25 years at
the helm of the magazine. In it, she places side-by-side the cover of the first issue she
edited, dating from April 1992, with her final one. On the cover of the 1992’s issue there
is a striking headline, asking: “Do we still need feminism?” (Vogue September 2017e,
81–83). This prominent headline, never directly addressed in Shulman’s letter, seems to
epitomise the earlier conceptions of postfeminism (Gill 2007; Angela McRobbie 2009),
which were marked by a dismissal and contempt for feminist ideals, rejecting it as out-of
-date and no longer needed, as the battle for gender equality was seen as already won.
This 1992 headline seems particularly at odds with the current cultural and political
context. As Laura Favaro and Rosalind Gill (2018) explore, in recent years feminist
discourses seem to have emerged as trending topics in popular media and “feminist”
has become a desirable label, notably in anglophone countries and increasingly, albeit
somewhat hesitantly, in other European cultural contexts, such as Spain.
This popular resurgence of feminism is clear in the studied magazines, all of which
include discourses that can be read as carrying a somewhat feminist ethos, emphasising
ideas of “girl power”, female empowerment, diversity, and touching upon questions of
10 S. P. CALDEIRA

gender politics. Although these girl power discourses are not necessarily feminist in them-
selves, they do seem to align these magazines with a simplified image of feminism as
a celebration of women. But openly political and feminist issues, such as the importance of
abortion rights (Cosmopolitan August 2017d, 166–172)—that a few years ago would have
been dismissed by popular media as boring (Rosalind Gill 2016, 615)—are now also being
featured in these women’s magazines, alongside fashion and beauty trends.
In both popular media outlets (e.g., Jennifer Baumgardner 2011; Kira Cochrane 2013)
and academic discussions (e.g., Prudence Chamberlain 2016, 2017; Jonathan Dean and
Kristin Aune 2015; Ealasaid Munro 2013) this contemporary resurgence of feminist ideals
is often presented as a fourth-wave wave of feminism.
While the wave narrative itself faces a lot of academic criticism for simplifying
feminism into clear-cut moments and generational divides, it is still a widely used
metaphor to convey a sense of feminist history. Following Chamberlain’s (2016) con-
ception, this article opts to understand the wave metaphor as an “affective temporality”,
seeing it as encompassing the segmentations, flows and continuities within and
between waves. A wave, then, is understood as feminism in the context of a specific
temporal and historical frame, taking into account the lived experiences of these eras.
In this light, rather than understanding the fourth-wave as a radical break from
previous feminist practices, this new wave is seen as a continuation of its earlier efforts
to achieve gender equality (Chamberlain 2017, 7). The fourth-wave maintains second-
wave ideas of consciousness-raising, focusing on sharing personal experiences (Mel
Aitken 2017, 6–7). It also borrows from a third-wave focus on the micropolitics of
everyday and concerns with intersectionality (Dean and Aune 2015, 5).
However, this fourth-wave is marked by the differences and specificities of the lived
experiences of young feminists today (Chamberlain 2016). As such, online and social
media—ever-present in contemporary everyday life—are adopted for new modes of
dissemination of information, debate, and activism. This use of social media is often
framed as the main particularity of the fourth-wave (Chamberlain 2017; Munro 2013, 23).
Social media is optimistically seen as allowing marginalised people to claim a political
voice, providing a platform for more diverse people to engage with feminism
(Chamberlain 2017, 4). Yet, it must be recognised that there is still a noticeable “digital
divide” that prevents an equal access to the tools of representation, as the access to
digital technologies is not equally distributed, both geographically and in terms of
wealth and age (Julia Schuster 2013, 11).
The validity of this fourth-wave is also a topic of academic debate (e.g., Dean and
Aune 2015; Chamberlain 2016). Some question whether the simple adoption of online
technologies is enough to claim a new era (Munro 2013, 23). While others question the
effectiveness of the fourth-wave, accusing it of “slacktivism”—overly reliant in online
activism that requires only minimal effort (Cerise Glenn 2015). Nevertheless, the idea of
a fourth-wave has unequivocally entered the cultural imaginary (Chamberlain 2016) and
is actively claimed by many young feminists (Baumgardner 2011).
As the studied magazines make an effort to position themselves as belonging to the
same universe of Instagram, drawing on its aesthetic and adopting its conventions, we
can understand the current popularity of feminist ideals in these publications as being
linked, at least partially, to this rise of fourth-wave feminism. In their recent study, Favaro
and Gill (2018) noted that contemporary UK women’s magazines sought to identify
 FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 11

themselves with feminism, not only due to the personal ideological beliefs of their
staffers, but also in order to align themselves (and profit) with the current cultural
moment of feminist popularity online, and to avoid backlash and being called out on
social media for their feminist lack of engagement.
In the analysed magazine sample an occasional recognition of this link between re-
emerging feminist concerns and the use of social media and Instagram can also be
observed. Articles on the international Women’s Marches of January 2017 present social
media as central for the organization and dissemination of the events (Glamour May 2017b,
68–69), and, drawing on the already discussed logic of popularity, boast the widespread of
its symbolic pink pussy hat by emphasising the large amount Instagram posts with the
#pussyhatproject (Glamour June 2017c, 29–31). Other analysed articles explore the idea of
hashtag activism, emphasising the political potential of Instagram as a platform for grass-
roots activism. These articles praise Instagram for allowing users to create their own political
agendas, to call out inequalities, and to quickly and transnationally circulate their feminist
messages. Instagram is shown as being used to spread awareness of various issues (from
women’s abortion rights in Ireland, body positivity, to racial discrimination), to raise funds,
and enact social change (Glamour August 2017e, 46–49).
Discourses on body positivity, recurrent in the analysed magazines, also draw from
the idea that social media can be used as a tool to counter unrealistic beauty standards.
Relying on user-generated content, these potentially diverse representations are seen as
having the potential to help challenge and subvert the established beauty standards,
and to normalise diversity, making visible differences in age, race, ethnicity, and sexu-
ality that are often absent from popular media (Burns 2015, 90). The studied magazines
acknowledge these body-positive discourses by featuring prominent body-positive
Instagram activists in their must-follow Instagram lists, alongside traditional celebrities
and fashion influencers. Instagrammers, such as @bodypositivepanda or @flawless_af-
fect, are hailed as “redefining beauty” and encouraging readers to love their bodies
(Glamour August 2017e, 56–59).
By adopting these feminist discourses, the analysed magazines seek to distance
themselves from the critiques of lack of diversity in representation of women and beauty
types that are generally directed at women’s magazine (Gill 2007, 12). The studied
magazines seem to be making an, often underwhelming, effort to showcase models of
different ethnical backgrounds, with different body types and ages, aligning themselves
with more diverse representation strategies body that can appeal to transnational
audiences (Kuipers, Chow and van der Laan 2014, 2165). In their articles, these maga-
zines seek to frame the fashion world, and by extension themselves, as increasingly
diverse, pointing out the “unconventional” models that were present in recent runway
shows—older, plus-size, hijab-wearing models, etc. At the same time, these celebratory
articles inadvertently employ contradictory discourses that frame this diversity as both
an increasingly established routine, a long-standing ethos of the fashion world, and as
the newest fashion trend (and, thus, potentially transitory) (Glamour September 2017f,
26–27). Magazines recognise this trend for increased diversity as being partially linked
with the rise of Instagram. The online popularity and loyal fan-base of some plus-size
Instagrammers is presented as the cause for designers inviting them into their runways.
The commercial viability of this diversity-turn is also acknowledged, by stating that there
is a “huge market for more diverse body shapes” (Glamour August 2017e, 46–48).
12 S. P. CALDEIRA

Glamour seemed to take a step further in celebrating diversity by launching an

open-call on Instagram to cast models for a beauty article. This article praised
Instagram as showcasing beauty “in many forms”, and seemed to rely on the
assumption that simply casting through Instagram would inevitably lead to more
diversity. Yet the young women selected by the magazine editorial team to be
featured in the article still largely adhered to the same conventional beauty ideals
that are common in popular media, despite showcasing some commendable racial
diversity. These mostly young and conventionally attractive women were still styled,
photographed and airbrushed by a professional team. And most of the selected
models were closely linked with the fashion and entertainment industries—being
fashion, beauty or lifestyle bloggers, aspiring musicians or actresses, make-up artists,
etc. (Glamour August 2017e, 138–151).
Magazines also rely on the idea of celebrity feminism (Hannah Hamad and Anthea
Taylor 2015; Janell Hobson 2017; Nicola Rivers 2017). As feminist discourses become
more widespread and “fashionable,” numerous celebrities—such as Beyoncé, Emma
Watson, or Lena Dunham—publicly claim the epitaph of feminists (Gill 2016, 618).
These declarations of allegiance are also present in the studied magazines, with celeb-
rities such as the British singer Dua Lipa stating “If you’re not a feminist, you’re a sexist”
(Glamour July 2017d, 122–123).
Celebrities like Emily Ratajkowski, emphasise the role of Instagram in their feminism.
She presents Instagram as the place where she can proudly declare herself as a feminist
to her millions of followers, a platform to raise awareness of political causes, but also to
post sexy selfies, which she frames as exercises of feminist freedom of choice and sexual
liberation (Glamour August 2017e, 128–137).
These discourses of celebrity feminism are often criticised by feminist scholars, view-
ing celebrities as co-opting and depoliticising feminism, using its current popularity to
further their own fame (Rivers 2017, 61). The platforms used by celebrity feminists tend
to privilege flashy declarations and sound-bite statements, often failing to convey
complexity and nuance (Hobson 2017, 999). These celebrity discourses thus have
a tendency to promote a homogenised, privileged and often white model of feminism,
that lacks intersectional awareness (Rivers 2017, 75). Yet, despite its problematics (Gill
2016; Hamad and Taylor 2015; Hobson 2017; Rivers 2017), the celebrity feminism
popularised in women’s magazines can nevertheless have a great cultural impact,
making feminist concepts accessible to a wider audience outside of the narrow circles
of academia and activist groups, while still maintaining a dialogue with these more
“traditional” forms of feminism (Hobson 2017).
Even though these women’s magazines have adopted openly feminist tones, these
discourses can also be read in light of a contemporary re-contextualization of the
concept of postfeminism (Gill 2016). This contemporary understanding has lost the
open dismissal and contempt for feminism that marked its earlier conceptions (Gill
2007; McRobbie 2009). Instead, it is able to selectively co-opt feminist discourses,
reworking them according to neoliberal feminist ideals (Catherine Rottenberg 2014).
Feminism is rebranded in terms of empowerment and choice, discourses of individual-
ism and personal agency, and emphasise fashion and beauty as empowering (Gill 2016,
613). These simplified neoliberal feminist discourses disregard the social, cultural and
economic causes of gender inequalities, placing instead the responsibility for female
 FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 13

empowerment on the individual (Rottenberg 2014). Concerns with deeper systemic

inequalities and with more overt forms of activism are thus often absent from these
women’s magazines.
In these contexts, feminism often becomes a “cheer word” used to celebrate the
successes of individual women, especially their entrepreneurial business achievements
(Gill 2016). In the studied sample, female celebrities and Instagrammers get frequently
framed as “girl bosses”, celebrating their successes in a male-dominated business world
as an equivalent to female empowerment (Cosmopolitan June 2017b, 30–38;
Cosmopolitan September 2017e, 32–38; Glamour August 2017e, 70–71). Female-
oriented business events, like the Cosmopolitan Self-Made Summit, also promote this
idea. Beauty and lifestyle Instagrammers are hailed as examples of self-made success
and invited to provide mentorship in these events, their expert status seemingly
validated by their millions of Instagram followers (Cosmopolitan May 2017a, 92–93;
Cosmopolitan July 2017c, 92–95).
The analysed magazines also expose their postfeminist sensibilities (Gill 2016) in their
frequent intertwining of the idea of female empowerment with the adoption of certain
fashion trends. The notion of “power dressing” recurrently appears in articles that equate
wearing masculine-inspired suits with a way to get ahead in business and to raise self-
confidence (Glamour October 2017g, 46–47; Glamour October 2017g, 99–100; Vogue
August 2017d, 121–123). And feminist icons, like the Guerrilla Girls or Frida Kahlo, get re-
appropriated as inspiration for bold make-up styles for “strong women” (Vogue
September 2017e, 345–347).
This contemporary postfeminism sensibility also allows for empowering and body-
positive discourses to exist in women’s magazines alongside articles advising feminine
efforts of beautification and body improvement (Duke and Kreshel 1998, 64). These contra-
dictory discourses can be present in the same article, as in a piece about fitness influencers,
who use their Instagram feeds to share their extreme training routines with millions of
followers, while at the same advocating body-positivity and showing concern for the eating
disorders these highly idealised posts can promote (Glamour May 2017b, 172–177).
By rebranding feminism in neoliberal terms (Rottenberg 2014) and adding elements
of a postfeminist sensibility (Gill 2016) to its discourses, these magazines can disregard
the existing contradictions between feminist ideals—epistemologically grounded in the
pursuit for the eradication of inequality—and the capitalist consumer lifestyle promoted
in these texts—often built on a system of wealth inequality and exploitation (Nicki Lisa
Cole and Alison D. Crossley 2009).
By detaching feminism from notions of systemic inequality, these magazines can
incorporate the idea of commodity feminism, reframing feminist ideals in terms of
individual choices of lifestyle and consumption (Robert Goldman, Deborah Heath and
Sharon Smith 1991, 336). This idea of consumerism as a source of women’s empower-
ment is historically well established, drawing back from third-wave feminism and its
individualisation of feminist efforts and closeness to popular and consumer cultures
(Cole and Crossley 2009; Dean and Aune 2015).
As an example, the aforementioned article on the International Women’s Marches
frames the mass producing and sale through social media of t-shirts with the feminist
slogan “Not Up for Grabs” as an act of feminist activism in itself (Glamour May 2017b,
68–69), without considering how these sales might actually benefit any feminist cause.
14 S. P. CALDEIRA

The wearing of “feminist branded clothing,” with feminist slogans and motifs, can be
optimistically claimed as a reassurance of the political commitment of the magazines, by
creating cultural visibility for a feminist identity (Rivers 2017, 59). T-shirts with slogans
such as “We should all be feminists” or “Be your own muse” are presented as popular
fashion items (Glamour July 2017d, 125; Glamour October 2017g, 204), and praised for
being “totally Instagrammable”, urging the readers to buy these items and Instagram
themselves with them, using their selfies as “a platform to make a positive declaration”
(Glamour August 2017e, 29).
In this way, commodity feminism seems to tame potentially disruptive feminist ideals
to the magazines’ economic necessities to continue promoting goods and securing
advertisers (McCracken 1993).
As it was seen before, these women’s magazines can comfortably maintain contra-
dictory discourses within themselves (Ballaster et al. 1993, 127). These paradoxical
discourses can also be extended to how magazines frame Instagram in their articles.
Although Instagram’s political potential is often openly recognised, the platform is more
frequently framed as belonging to the same fashion, beauty, and celebrity realms that
women’s magazines inhabit. In the analysed magazines Instagram is also shown as
fostering the desire for idealised bodies or facial features, that magazines present as
achievable, for example, through exercise routines (Cosmopolitan August 2017d,
100–101) or cosmetic surgery (Cosmopolitan October 2017f, 132–138). Instagram is
also presented as a source of fashion inspiration, by emulating the styles of the “Insta-
elite” of fashion influencers (Cosmopolitan May 2017a, 57–58; Glamour August 2017e,
26–27), or as a way of discovering Instagrammable new trends and emerging designers
globally (Glamour August 2017e, 18–19).
Social media and Instagram are not monolithic. They can function both as a platform
for political empowerment and for the representation of diverse identities, and also as
a site for the reproduction of hegemonic ideals of femininity (Nicola Döring, Anne Reif,
and Sandra Poeschl 2016, 955), bodily idealization and self-surveillance (Burns 2015).
Framing Instagram as a fashion and beauty-related platform, allows it to fit comfortably
with the role of women’s magazines as a site for the construction of idealised notions of
femininity and beauty ideals (Ballaster et al. 1993; Gill 2007; Inness 2004).

Conclusion
Although now sharing the media environment with Instagram and other social media
platforms, women’s glossy fashion magazines remain a popular media format for creat-
ing and circulating narratives of idealised femininity on a transnational level (Kuipers,
Chow, and van der Laan 2014; Yan and Bissell 2014).
As these magazines are reconfigured by their intertextual relationship with Instagram,
their texts gain added layers of complexity, adopting some of Instagram’s conventions,
aesthetics, discourses, and social media logic (Van Dijck and Poell 2013). Instagram
metrics of popularity get embraced by magazines as a way to strengthen and validate
their pre-existing cult of celebrity, in a clear example of the logic of social and mass
media reinforcing each other (Van Dijck and Poell 2013, 6). Other Instagram conventions,
such as its Instagrammable aesthetic or the use of hashtags, username handles, emojis
or internet slang, are also frequently employed by women’s magazines, mostly as
 FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 15

a stylistic convention that seeks to intertextually link magazines and Instagram as

belonging to the same media universe (Bazerman 2004). These printed hashtags and
usernames are thus used in ways that are completely divorced from their intended
technological affordances and practical digital uses (Livingstone 2008; Van Dijck 2013).
As the studied magazines embrace Instagram’s discourses, aesthetics and conven-
tions, they have also adopted a seemingly feminist discourse, drawing on the current
popularity of fourth-wave feminism (Chamberlain 2017; Gill 2016; Munro 2013) and its
use of social media platforms for feminist engagement. Magazines openly recognise the
political potential of Instagram: celebrities get praised for their feminist ideals and
present their Instagram feeds as platforms for feminist consciousness-raising, clothing
with feminist slogans gets exalted as Instagrammable must-haves, and body-positive
articles now feature alongside fashion and beauty trends.
Yet, the study of these women’s magazines must critically acknowledge that these are
complex and multi-layered texts that can often carry contradictory meanings (Ballaster
et al. 1993). A cheerful celebration of Instagram can co-exist in magazines with critical
and even negative views on the platform. And seemingly feminist ideals are often
presented in an oversimplified manner, lacking the necessary nuance and attention to
intersectionality. Feminism in women’s magazines becomes enmeshed in neoliberal
discourses and postfeminist sensibilities (Gill 2016) that shift the focus onto generic
celebrations of individualised empowerment, choice and commodity feminism
(Goldman, Heath, and Smith 1991), forgoing concerns with deeper systemic inequalities.
In this way, potentially disruptive feminist ideals become compliant to magazines’
commercial interests, comfortably co-existing with their idealised and limited represen-
tations of femininities and beauty ideals.
Despite the acknowledgement of the potential of social media to showcase a wider
array of representations of women, the intertextual influence of Instagram does not
seem to have changed the core of the studied women’s magazines and its gender
politics. Rather, Instagram gets embedded in their texts as belonging to the same
fashion and beauty universe of women’s magazines. Fashion and feminism, beautifica-
tion efforts and body positivity, peacefully co-exist side-by-side in women’s fashion
magazines, and, as such, these must always be critically and tentatively approached.

Note
1. All references to the magazine’s titles—Cosmopolitan, Glamour, and Vogue—refer to the UK-
based editions, collected between April and September 2017, which served as the theore-
tical sample for this article.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding
This work was supported by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia [SFRH/BD/116452/2016].
16 S. P. CALDEIRA

Notes on contributor
Sofia P. Caldeira is a PhD-candidate at Ghent University, conducting a research project on
representations of femininity on Instagram and women’s glossy fashion magazines. E-mail: anaso-
fia.pereiracaldeira@ugent.be

ORCID
Sofia P. Caldeira http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7681-6952

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