The Visual Semiotics of Fragrance Branding: Exploring Jean Paul Gaultier's "Le Male"
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This major research paper (MRP) examines the visual semiotics of Jean Paul Gaultier’s “Le Male” fragrance for men and how this brand appeals to gay male audiences. It seeks to address the following questions: How do product packaging, print advertising, and video advertising use visual semiotics to appeal to gay male audiences? What image of masculinity is being communicated? And how is gay male desire being commoditized? To answer these questions the study examined three artefacts through a compositional interpretation and a visual semiotic analysis: the fragrance bottle, a print advertisement, and a video commercial. The research demonstrates that “Le Male” appeals to gay male audiences through three strategies: (1) sexual objectification of the male body; (2) use of gay iconography, especially depictions of homoeroticism among sailors and homage to the illustrated erotica of Tom of Finland; and (3) gay-coded visual polysemy. Furthermore, it depicts attractive men with ambiguous sexual orientation as objects of worship. Jean Paul Gaultier’s “Le Male” integrates the idealized male form into its cologne bottle design, print and video advertisements. Its carefully crafted homoerotic fantasies resonate with a queer aesthetic, but do so within a minimal set of superficial values reflected in the fleetingly beautiful body. This study is relevant to how professional communicators can weave a coherent, visual story through a deeper understanding of rhetorical signs and symbols that resonate with specific subcultures. Findings from this MRP will be discussed along with suggestions for the brand to retain its success among gay consumers. The study also initiates further research in the areas of empirical confirmation, feminist gaze theory, intercultural theory, and multi-sensory branding.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".