Embroidery and It`s Associations with `The feminine`

Classic Bike Guide

Windsurf Magazine

Despite the distortion of the early history of embroidery, when male and female embroiderers worked professionally alongside each other to produce highly prized and valuable textiles, and also a number of very skilled male contemporary artists working in this field, embroidery will always have lingering associations with the feminine.  I was very conscious of this in my choice of magazines, and I have therefore attempted to chose from a wide range of material appealing to both male and female consumers.  This also subverts the idea that magazines appeal mainly to women, and are viewed as a low-brow form of entertainment, which can be dipped into, making their format easy to pick up and put down again, and therefore more appealing to women. This theory is explored by the writer Linda McLoughlin in her book `The Language of Magazines`, in which she puts forward the view that this is a very outdated idea, when we look at the number of women working outside the home, and the growing market of magazines aimed at men.  When chosing magazines for this project, I found a far greater number of men browsing through  magazines, and from personal experience, the males in my household subscribe to, and buy more magazines than I do, apart from those purchased for this project of course.