How does your media product represent particular social groups?

For my Front Cover design I focused on representing the genre of hip-hop. Hip-hop is definately more of an American social group but is rapidly moving over to the UK. Soulja Boy and 50 Cent who feature on the Front Cover of XXL are big American hip-hop artists and often rap about the word "swag" which basically means the way you dress and your attitude, for example Soulja Boy has a well known song called "turn my swag on". My hip-hop magazine is based on this word "swag" as I used it for my title and thought that it would definately attract the particular social group I was aiming for.

The image below shows how I tried to incorporate the hip-hop style into my own magazine,

As you can see I asked my models Anthony and Ali to pose in basically the exact same pose as 50 Cent and Soulja Boy. I asked Anthony and Ali to pose with a serious look to pull of the whole hip-hop style, you can also see that I dressed them in similar outfits to fit the mise-en-scene, for example I drew a Superman tattoo on Anthony to show the link between him and Soulja Boy, tattoos are becoming a big craze in America and within the hip-hop stereotype. As you can see Anthony is wearing a red NY flat cap which is also part of the hip-hop stereotype, many males and females wear NY flat caps, for example the image below.

These NY hats are brought and personalised by some American hip-hop artists, as you can see there are plenty of designs and colours to choose from. I decided to include the hat in my image because I believe it gave it more of a hip-hop stereotype, I was going the image without the hat but in the end I thought the image with the hat gave my front cover that extra something. Here is the two images below..

I brought some gold necklaces from Primark to add to the hip-hop stereotype, I got my ideas of what the hip-hop stereotype looked like, by watching music videos on YouTube and searching artists such as Soulja Boy on google. Below is an image that helped to inspire the overall look along side the XXL front cover.

As you can see in the image above Soulja Boy has tattoos and flat cap and bling. I focused on these three things for my mise-en-scene and hopefully pulled it off.

Throughout my whole magazine I kept to the same stereotype, for my Contents page I had to copy the American hip-hop artist Nicki Minaj who is also very well known at the moment. She has recently been worldwide and her number of fans is constantly increasing. I asked my friend Natasha to copy a few different Nicki Minaj poses which we found online so that she could get into the role. Here's a few examples...

This image I did not use for my contents page as it didn't show a clear link at all, these images where literally to experiment with different poses giving me a wider range of images to choose from.

I personally thought that my model had a similar look to Nicki Minaj and fitted the part very well, this image was also not used for my front cover design but was just to show the different experiments I tried out.

This image above is to show that to create the whole female hip-hop stereotype I searched on YouTube a Nicki Minaj styled makeup video and followed it step by step to create this look. I did the makeup myself, using different eyeshadows and fake eyelashes. This represents the female side of hip-hop and how the makeup is very over the top and heavy.

The image below is a picture of the contents page I copied and my copy. As you can see I dressed my model in a similar outfit again and have her posing with the same sort of attitude.

I personally think that my hip-hop magazine "SWAG" represents young adults from around about teens to early 20s as the image on my front cover depicts two young men, one with a cap on, tattoos and some "bling" and the other a tank top and some "bling" and this style is very popular among hip-hop/rap fans. It also represents people who are and have been part of hip-hop culture meaning they follow the music, lifestyle and fashion of this genre..