Approaching Masculinity in Dolce & Gabbana Advertising: A Visual Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract

Different models of masculinity have been introduced in society and, consequently, in discourse in the last decades. This article will approach the portrayal of masculinity in a sample of Dolce & Gabbana advertisements published in their newsletter from 1 January 2016 until 1 January 2021. The main objectives of this article are the following: 1) to deconstruct the main visual strategies used by Dolce & Gabbana to represent men in its newsletter; and 2) to characterize the main types of men’s representation as social actors, in order to observe and systematize the predominant models of masculinity. The analysis will be done taking into consideration the model of visual social actors proposed by van Leeuwen (2008) and visual grammar (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2021), in order to deconstruct the main characteristics of the visuals and to observe how masculinity is portrayed from the visual point of view. The findings indicate that the predominant model is connected with classical masculinity although there are texts in which other types of masculinities are presented.