The Role of Mass Media in Influencing Women`s Beauty Concept in Lauren Weisberger`s Novel “The Devil Wears Prada

This study analyzes the role of mass media in influencing women`s beauty concept. Mass media especially fashion magazine nowadays often represents female models with skinny body. This condition makes women feel unconfident with their own physical appearance. This final project is aimed at analyzing how mass media influencing women`s beauty concept as reflected in “The Devil Wears Prada” and the objective of the study is answering the statements of problem as below: First, illustrate how mass media especially fashion magazines influences women`s beauty concept in modern society as reflected in the novel. Second, the effects of women`s beauty concept in mass media for the women in modern society as reflected in the novel. I employ Lauren Weisberger`s “The Devil Wears Prada” as the object of this study. This study is a descriptive qualitative study with Sociology of Literature as the approach. It is descriptive qualitative since the data of the study are in the form of words, phrases, sentences, narrations and dialogues and I do not employ computation. The data are gained by reading the novel thoroughly, identifying, inventorying, and classifying then the analysis is done by selecting and explaining. This investigation results in several findings. First, mass media is the most effective tool of promotion and influential in today`s modern society. In the The Devil Wears Prada, mass media which represented by Runway magazine, has great influence in creating the beauty trends for women. The concept of beauty created because fashion magazines often use skinny and glamorous woman as their model for beauty products. Second, the impacts of the women`s beauty concept are the emerge of women`s beauty standards, the existence of generalization or stereotyping, and the emerge of discrimination. Thus, people tend to judge someone`s intellectual and character only by looking at his physical appearance. Therefore, beauty becomes a benchmark of someone's success. For the next researcher, I suggest to analyze about how we can survive from the bad influence of ideologies that developed in the society by mass media.