Many of the images we now find in magazines, news, promotional material and advertisements are bought cheaply from image banks like Getty Images, which can be accessed by people all around the world. These images are technically of high quality. They have bright lighting and flat colours; attractive models are highly posed and are set in non-descript locations to make them usable across the world. They do not represent actual places or events and they do not document or bear witness, but they symbolically represent marketable concepts and moods such as ‘contentment’ and ‘freedom’. The world in magazines and other similar media therefore comes to resemble the limited world of the image bank categories, which are based on marketing categories. This is therefore an ideologically pre-structured world which is in harmony with consumerism.

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A B S T R A C T. Like fast food and fizzy drinks, discourses are globally marketed by powerful multinational corporations. In this article we look at discourses about women which are distributed around the planet by the 44 different national versions of Cosmopolitan. These versions are localized, but still transmit the Cosmo brand, resulting in similarities between the versions. We apply a multimodal discourse analytic approach to understand this global branding, the type of analysis which is lacking in existing accounts of globalization, and ask, what exactly does remain the same across the localized versions? What this article offers is not an analysis of the magazine per se, but an analysis of the discourses that underpin it. We show how the magazine creates a fantasy world through the use of low modality images, which allow a particular kind of agency, mainly sex, to signify power. The multimodal realizations of Cosmo discourse enable women to signify their alignment with the Cosmo world through such things as the cafes they frequent, the clothes they wear and the way that they dance. Cosmo presents these not as real, but as playful fantasies, something which existing literature on women's magazines has missed. In these fantasies, women act alone and rely on acts of seduction and social manoeuvreing, rather than on intellect, to act in and on the world. K E Y W O R D S : branding, globalization, multimodal analysis, women, women's magazines