Il linguaggio del silenzio nella comunicazione pubblicitaria della moda e del lusso: un'indagine semiotica

Abstract - The luxury fashion is an important industry from both the economic and socio-cultural perspectives, since the high sales volume marks it as a crisis-proof sector, where the luxury fashion brands trigger specific cognitive, emotional, and behavioural effects on their end users. Yet, marketing and semiotics literatures still have to fully enquire into the use of multimodality in the production of advertisements. This paper explores this multimodal construction of print advertising of luxury brands, focusing on the semantic dimensions of “textual silence”. In particular, the qualitative analysis carried out by this study exemplifies how the choice between “offer” and “demand” images and their disposition as visual vectors are meant to activate specific interpretations and reactions by receivers, without resorting to written language. Besides the application of the theoretical background of multimodality to the luxury fashion industry, this paper has practical implications as well, for it develops a framework for the analysis of the advertising discourse which encompasses semiotic, linguistic and motivational aspects.