Representation of Beauty: Gendered Discourses in Czech and Indonesian Advertisements

Beauty advertising is a public multimodal site in which gendered beauty ideals are made visible and linked to consumption. This study examines how beauty is constructed in the linguistic landscape (LL) of public advertisements in two localized urban settings: Olomouc, the Czech Republic, and Malang, Indonesia. We combine LL as the spatial and sociolinguistic framework, multimodal analysis through Cheong's (2004) Generic Structure Potential (GSP), and Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA), operationalized through Fairclough's (1992) three-dimensional model. Rather than treating the two sites as representative of their countries or regions, we use them as comparative case studies to examine how similar global beauty discourses are recontextualized through local advertising practices. The analysis of 41 photographs identifies three recurring discursive patterns across the dataset: idealized body image, the incorporation of local cultural and religious references, and the use of global English. The comparison shows that the shared commercial logic is realized differently: Olomouc advertisements more often foreground a singular Eurocentric and body-focused ideal, whereas Malang advertisements combine skin-focused ideals with a wider repertoire of cultural, religious, gendered, and price-related appeals. These findings contribute empirical evidence on how public-space advertising links globalized beauty norms to locally specific semiotic resources, while also showing how the language of choice, diversity, and empowerment can remain embedded in consumerist regimes.