And there she was. an urban angel. Made not born - A Case Study in Advertising Persuasion.

In an epoch in which no value seems to exist, youngsters are turning to their own invented values conveyed and confirmed by music, films, fashion which help them to have some reference points in order to survive in our more and more frantic urban landscapes. The type of advertisements addressed to young people is no exception as it creates, supports and reinforces those lifestyles that are more in tune with cityscapes. In this turmoil offered by such a new cultural trend, GHD advertisement seems to follow an opposite direction, as both the visual and the bodycopy of GHD new ad campaign are strongly interrelated with religion. However, the ‘new’ value GHD is offering young people is a kind of religion that differs from the traditional one in the sense that it appears to be more in line with city-fashion than with asceticism. By exploiting the linguistic strategies of traditional religious discourse, GHD manages to create an intriguingly new identity in which texts and pictures are interwoven in such a way as to perfectly adhere to the exigencies of our modern urban life. In my paper, I will illustrate how GHD advertising campaign establishes the identity and success of the firm within the hair-product market thanks to intertextuality, which has played a fundamental role in creating a net of relationships with both the religious visual art (all the advertised pictures recall Caravaggio’s or Tiziano’s painting styles), the Holy Scriptures (all the advertised texts are an imitation of the Gospel), and the modern cityscapes (the advertised photos and texts clearly refer to the most recent urban lifestyles). The investigation on GHD visuals will reveal how pictures are employed and exploited to intermingle with the bodycopy in order to sinuously lead the target audience to the right interpretation of the text. Here the anachronistic aspects offered by the imitation of both religious discourse and art are contrasted by the visual which represents a hibernated moment of the modern rushing hours and, at the same time, foregrounds the emergence of a new static hope: the urban angel.