Visualization of Old and New Luxury in Print Advertisements

The research paper is devoted to the analysis of visualization of old and new luxury in print advertising. The study is intended to reveal how new luxury brands manage to create and maintain their prestigious image without making their products inaccessible for the majority of customers. This purpose is attained by means of a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. Firstly, every image from a sample of print advertisements has to be split up into four distinct parts (advertised product, persons, additional objects and background). Secondly, all advertisements from the sample are needed to be scrutinized with the help of semiotic interpretative techniques. The outlined investigation has proved the hypothesis that visual representations of old and new luxury differ from each other due to the fact that the motivations for their consumption are dissimilar. All in all, the work consists of three parts: an overall analysis of the concept of luxury, review of the literature dedicated to semiology and the comparison of old and new luxury visualization in print advertising based on semiotic approach.