Brand references and music video intertextuality: Lessons from Summer Girls and She Looks So Perfect

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This article seeks to analyse the use of fashion brands in two pop music videos: LFO’s Summer Girls and 5 Seconds of Summer’s She Looks So Perfect. The analysis takes a multimodal discourse and intertextual approach, by teasing out the uses of the brand name and the imagery of the music videos, in order to compare the video-brand relations in each. Through this analysis, it is possible to see this intertextuality as a dialectic relationship that provides a unique meaning for each, while also evaluating the desirability of both. Moreover, using each pairing as a stand-in for cultural messages presented to teens, it is possible to tease out representational issues between the release of Summer Girls in 1999 and She Looks So Perfect in 2014. This suggests changes in sexual behaviour, the increasing sexualization of western society and general consumption habits, with less movement in representations of race, gender and sexual orientation.</jats:p>