Decoding visuals: The social semiotics of Make Love Not Walls

Sammanfattning: Fashion is an industry that reflects on society and comments on it through advertisement campaigns. Besides increasing brand awareness and growing sales, some fashion brands create campaigns for e.g. protesting and voicing out socio-cultural and political statements. The Italian fashion brand Diesel has taken part in discussions related to civil, social and political issues that touch upon certain issues apparent in our society. This thesis aims to investigate how Diesel's Make Love Not Walls campaign visual images construct meanings and also explore what kind of culturally coded myths are evoked in the images. The methodological foundation and approach of the study are exemplified by complementing cognitive theories that attribute the construction of images from the audience perspective and understanding of visual metaphors in certain cultural contexts. When formulating the theoretical framework for the social semiotic analysis, the concept of socio-cultural and political participation is taken into consideration. This study adopts a visual social semiotic perspective to investigate how visual images themselves are constructed to cue culturally coded metaphors. The visual realization of metaphors is elucidated based on Barthes’ theory of Myths. It is found that most types of visual myths identified by visual social semiotics can be explained within the framework. Myths in the campaign are analyzed in terms of their persuasive effects. Finally, it can be concluded that the social semiotic framework is able to provide a comprehensive account of the visual realization in the construction of meanings, and in addition, the study offers a cognitive explanation of how resources like framing, composition and image angles acquire meanings.