Binary's Metamorphosis: Seeing through gender representations in Luxury Masstige Perfume Brands' Social Media Storytelling.

When navigating the social media platforms of luxury perfume brands, it is evident that these brands rely on storytelling as well as the adoption of celebrity endorsers and influencers for their campaigns and promotional strategies. In a societal and cultural context where the issue of binary versus fluid representations is of significant importance, as advertisements and campaigns are institutions that shape common beliefs, the question of how luxury perfume brands are interpreting gender in their social media storytelling emerges. Consequently, after detecting and exposing how gender is portrayed, the question of how these representations intersect with contemporary perceptions of gender and cultural values arises. Through the use of semiotics for Visual Analysis and of Critical Discourse Analysis tools for Textual Analysis, 150 posts from the Instagram accounts of luxury perfume brands were sampled and analyzed to extract concrete and real-time evidence, thereby defining the aforementioned portrayals. The main findings suggest that the storytelling approach of these brands is persistently heteronormative, with few instances of fluid representations, which are mainly mediated by the use of community-driven storytelling or by the adoption of queer endorsers. However, there were variations in the heteronormative representations between stereotypical and non-conventional portrayals of women, as the latter emphasized androgynous style codes as well as female empowerment, liberation, and self-love. Regarding the more fluid representations, it is argued that they were partly manifested through the integration of non-binary personas, the concept of community, the use of non-binary lexical marks, or the use of concepts abstractly, while lacking gendered lexical nuances altogether. It is therefore suggested that, ultimately, some brands like Dolce & Gabbana and Dior continue to reproduce sexual representations of gender identities and roles based on a binary framework. In contrast, other brands appear more progressive through the ownership of female empowerment. Nevertheless, instances of gender fluidity are rather limited, particularly in the context of textual storytelling rather than visual storytelling.