Fashion War is a Hong Kong drama produced by TVB Company and it
is released in February, 2016. It talks about the office politics of a famous fashion
magazine, MODES and this drama reveals some dark side of the fashion
industry. The genre of this TV series is modern drama, fashion and romantic.
Moses Chan acts as the
character of Yip Long, a chief editor of MODES. This drama shows a high degree
of hierarchical system that Yip Long owes a lot of authority no matter on
publishing or even can control the whole industry. Everyone call him ‘Trendsetter’
and see him as an icon of fashion. However, this shows the authoritarian of Yip
Long and it is a small circle for the rich to control the trend in the society.
It reflects the social issues happened in reality. The monopolization of the
superior exploits the poor and they can control the constructions of the
society. The context of the drama creates the cultural proximity among the
audiences that it can be easily to be understood.
Besides, the social role of gender in the upper part of the drama is in male dominance. According to Das& Gupta (1995), “gender role are socially constructed based on the differences in the patterns of behaviors of men and women"(p.4).Gender role divide what is the man's role and female's role. Although there are still many working women in this
drama, the policymakers are all men. Women are still in a subordinate position
and listens to the male. In the latter part of the drama, the emergence of the
character of Ali Lee acts as Vincy Kei, a head of the advertising department,
shift the boundaries of gender role. She is the female leader in this drama and
has power to bargain with the men. She always competes with Yip Long and challenges
him. Vincy is a divorced woman and was abandoned by her husband. She is a
strong character and do not want the men to look down on her. There is a
resistance to the society that abandoned woman can also be very strong and do
not have to rely on men. In addition, the ending of this drama is Yip Long
recommend Yannes Cheung, Sisley Choi acts, to be the next ‘Trendsetter’ of the
fashion. The cultural context shows the changing image of the women and its status
in the society.
Nevertheless, with
reference to Hall (2000), “audience is both the source and the receiver of the
television message” (p.53). In this situation, TVB is the encoder in this TV
series and the decoder is the audience. TVB absorb the source from observing
the situation in the reality that people always blindly follow the trend. TVB
want to emphasis the ideology that fashion is controlled by a group of people. They
decided what the trend of the society is. And the decoder is operating inside
the dominant code and the content creates the sense of cultural identity. This
message is meaningfully decoded that the audiences agree to the dominant code
and it is effective to let the audiences to reflect their daily lives. The
audience gain resonance while watching the series and many people criticize the
character of Yip Long is actually imitating the famous fashion icon, Karl
Lagerfeld.
To conclude, the
context of the drama constructs the identities of Hong Kong people. The way of
living of the characters is in realism that audience can easily understand. The
production of Fashion War conveys an ideology
with dominant contextual discourse that the decoder understands what the
messages the encoder want to emphasis.
Reference:
Das, M. S., & Gupta, V. K. (1995). Gender roles and family analysis. New Delhi: M.D. Publications.
Hall, S. (2000.) Encoding/Decoding. In P.
Marris & S. Thornham (eds.). Media Studies:
A Reader. (pp.51-61). Washington Square, N.Y.: New York
University Press.
Name: Wu Wan Ki Angela
Student number:
10556080, 21620845
Word count: 599words
Dear Angela, There are two points that you want to make in your discussion of "Fashion War." One is on gender and the other on fashion per se. The discussion on gender is fine but that on fashion is complicating something simple. You can try to combine the two arguments into one single theme, discussing how professional trendsetter (/winner of a game) is stereotyped as man and followers (losers) often as women. This could make the essay more coherent.
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