A Serious Comedy of Fashion and Beauty

Through practice-led research, this project creatively explores common consumerist and sexist messages targeted primarily toward women through fashion and beauty advertisements. It visualizes what these ads would look like if they revealed their true intentions. Deconstructing and reconstructing existing fashion and beauty advertisements into new images, the project attempts to make those messages explicit in a parodic collage series. The final body of work emerges from an emotional perspective and constitutes four themes—internalization of the gaze, addiction to consumption, transcendence of pleasure into pain (jouissance), and inauthentic body positivity. The collage series created through the lens of consumerism, feminism, and self-objectification aims to incite frustration in viewers and consumers, make them cognizant of the harmful values promoted across fashion and beauty ads, and encourage them to evaluate their relationship with fashion and beauty products and practices.