Filipino-ness in Carl Jan Cruz’s Instagram fashion campaigns

Abstract

This study was conducted to determine the Filipino-ness in Carl Jan Cruz’s campaign on Instagram. Specifically it identified how Filipino-ness was shown in Instagram campaigns in terms (a) captioning; (b) visual; (c) scene; (d); emotion; and objects. The content analysis design was utilized to analyze the objective of the study and the Cognitive Theory in Visual Perception was used to identify the Filipino-ness in Carl Jan Cruz’s Instagram fashion campaigns. It was found out that: (1) the caption is to promote certain services or products of the brand, Filipino ness is present because of the use of Tagalog words and Filipino-ness is not present in the hashtag and @mention, because they are purely for marketing purposes; (2) Majority of Carl Jan Cruz’ campaigns used photography to promote its product or services. No Filipino-ness is manifested; (3) Filipino-ness is present in some scenes because they utilized locations within the country; (4) Most of the models exude fierceness and self-confidence, some emotions are non-verbal cues from body movements; and (5) Carl Jan Cruz mostly inspired his collection and designs by his own cultural heritage, memories and the unconventional things we see every day. This study recommends and encourages the fashion industry to get inspiration from their own culture to create a more authentic brand identity.