Glamour Magazine - Textual Analysis

This magazine has Jennifer Lopez on the front. Although she doesn't fall into the target audience of this magazine, she can still seen as aspirational to the readers. Even women younger than her want to look like her, so she is a style icon for the readers. She isn't necessarily sexualised on the cover but she does have a low cut dress on. The typical readers of Glamour (18-35 year old females) wouldn't see the sexualised side to the cover image, but it's been done to attract attention to her style and her look, which can be influential on readers. Her eye contact with the camera (and therefore the reader) pushes the idea further that she is setting an influence on the readers, and this eye contact makes the reader feel connected to Lopez. 

The main colours on the cover are pink, orange and black. The pink feminises the magazine and makes it instantly recognisable that it's aimed at women. The masthead is bold and pink and emphasises the word 'Glamour'. This sets the genre of the magazine - it makes it obvious that it's going to be about glamour and beauty. The cover image makes this obvious as well because Lopez is styled well with her hair and make-up heavily done. The cover lines also set the genre of glamour with key phrases bolded, like "The Shoe Issue" and "1209 Hot High Street Buys". These enigma codes will appeal to the magazine's target audience of 18-35 year olds because this age group is typically interested in fashion and looking fashionable. Another cover line that stands out is "Jennifer, Tells all about her new friendship with Posh". The magazine has used Victoria Beckham's nickname in this cover line, because the readers will be able to already identify who 'Posh' is. Victoria Beckham is someone the readers will take an interest in because she's a successful singer, model and fashion designer, and is also married to David Beckham, so women will aspire to be like her. This serves as another enigma for the magazine because readers will be interested to find out more about her friendship with Jennifer Lopez. They are both very influential women, so putting their names together on a cover line will attract readers. 

At the bottom of the cover, a cover line reads "Buy shoes, lose weight!". There is a big pressure on women from the media to be an ideal weight, and this cover line pushes this pressure further. The magazine doesn't offer a diet plan or some sort of way to lose the weight - it just states "lose weight", as though the magazine is demanding the reader to lose weight. Another cover line reads "How modelling almost killed me". This is an enigma code as it doesn't give any detail into how it almost killed the person, but it could be to do with weight. Just like before - there is a lot of pressure on women from the media to look a certain way, and models feel this pressure a lot. It could be a reference to an illness like anorexia which almost killed her, but the fact remains that it's just an enigma code so the reader won't know. However, this could potentially be a contradiction from the magazine here, because they demand the reader to lose weight, but then they have a story about how someone's modelling almost killed her. Although there is no description on this yet, it could be about pressure from the media.