Forbidden Fruit
How has modern popular culture constructed social narratives about women through publication design & profits-led advertising?
Forbidden Fruit is a contemporary retrospective on the exploitation of women in print media in the early 2000’s. By mimicking and parodying familiar publications targeted towards and featuring women, Forbidden Fruit aims to draw fresh attention to the harmful messaging that women were frequently exposed to in these popular, socially endorsed publications. The central piece of the work, a parodic take on a Cosmopolitan magazine, required engagement with the original source material at length. This endeavoured to capture both the written and visual ways in which these magazines subtly, and often unsubtly, perpetuated internalised misogyny to a whole generation of young women.
Drawing on the design elements and imagery present in early 2000’s cultural and countercultural publications, Forbidden Fruit repackages these iconic layouts through a critical contemporary lens. Accepting the magazine as a symbolic cultural item, this self aware publication takes the familiar into the realm of the absurd, alienating and thus challenging our idea of ‘the normal’.
Effort was taken to study and replicate the popular magazine layouts - including typesetting and photography. Most of the photos were taken myself with perfume bottles, phones, and other products being sold being photoshopped in post.
Great care was taken to replicate the voice and tone of early 2000’s magazine publishers, completing an in-depth study of their language and visual messaging to ensure that the metaphor held strong and the correct parts of the food models were emphasised to create cohesive allegories.
