Materialism -the third essay assignment-

In this Chapter, White introduces the ways the marketing industry shapes trends by influencing teenagers to buy products.
One of the powerful tools of shaping trends is obviously magazines. Many teenagers learn trends by reading magazines and indeed, there are hundreds of fashion magazines in Japan. You'll see so many kinds of magazines in book stores that you might be surprised. Moreover, each magazine has a totally different style from others.

This is mainly because people have too many different styles and preferences in Japanese fashion and each group needs a "textbook" representing the style. It can be said that there is no magazine which covers all of the styles, so as long as it is about fashion, a girly girl and a girl with used clothes never read the same magazine. Their styles are just too different and since poeple prefer "detailed" information about fashion, it is almost impossible to write an article which sastisfies both girly ones and grunge-style fans.

As I wrote above, magazines in Japan look kind of like "textbooks" because they have all specific, detailed information of how to be fashionable. The fashion icons(TV stars, models, sometimes some of the magazine's own readers) are like teachers; the readers copy the way the ir icon dresses and buy the same dress she wears on the magazine's cover. There are pages of how-to articles too, about from how to do the latest make-up to how to get a boyfriend. These how-to articles are often really in details: for example, if it is about a make-up, they explain it step by step with many pictures. So these are manuals for the readers. If you feel like buying one of the hand bags recomended in the magazine, there are even a list of the shops with telephone numbers and maps.

Editors of magazines have created more methods to influence their readers effectively above these, but I think too many people are influenced by what they read. They copy the style in magazines almost as it is, adding no sense of their own. Then, everyone on a street look alike with the same dress and the same hair style. In a way, this situation shows that the marketing has succeeded and is good for the business. However, people seem to be losing uniqueness and it is boring even if their styles are fashionable in theory. I think we need to find a way to take only the information that is necessary for us and stop copying everything in magazines.